


Stakes (Breached Boundaries #3)

by Dusk Peterson (duskpeterson)



Series: The Three Lands [15]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Asexual Character, Asexuality, Bards, Blood Brothers, Celibacy, Character(s) of Color, F/M, Family, Fantasy, Female Character of Color, Female Protagonist, Friendship, Gen, Goddesses, Gods, Het, Lords, Male Character of Color, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Multi, Music, Original Fiction, Original Het, POV Character of Color, Princes, Princesses, Recovery, Romance, Romantic Friendship, Rulers, Sick Character, Soldiers, Spies, War, ambassadors, celibate characters, don't need to read other stories in the series, gen - Freeform, ladies, nonbinary-to-male, original gen, slavefic, traders - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:54:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26693287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duskpeterson/pseuds/Dusk%20Peterson
Summary: "It came from the east, swelling like the wind into an exultant thrust of song. It spoke, in its very melody, of charging, pounding, crushing. It hammered through the air like a battering ram, it gathered energy like a fist about to strike, and then it swooped past me in the form of grey-uniformed soldiers."As war thunders forth, a fleeing slave-princess discovers that all is not as she thought.Endangered by her cousin the Prince, Serva must take refuge with a protector, for despite being the King's bastard daughter, she was long ago condemned to slavery. She has little power of her own.But when she loses her best hope for protection, she must draw upon her strength to protect herself. Soon she will realize that others need her protection as well.Boilerplate warning for all my stories.
Relationships: Original Female Character & Original Male Character, Original Female Character/Original Male Character, Original Male Character & Original Male Character
Series: The Three Lands [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/15107
Collections: A Whisper to the  Dark Side, Badass women centric stories, Chains: The Powerfic Archive, Female Characters Deserve Better, Focus on Female Characters, Queer Characters Collection, Slavefic Central, Women being awesome





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _**Author's note:** This is the third story in _Breached Boundaries _, a volume in the Three Lands series. You don't need to read the other stories in the series to understand this one._

( _Melody:_ Repeats themes and sub-themes separately. _Lyrics:_ Show what is at stake in the conflict.)  


**TESTIMONY OF RICHARD, PRINCE OF DAXIS, BY WAY OF THE ROYAL CLERK OF DAXIS**

The Prince of Daxis asks me to express his thanks to you for your enquiry. He has no contribution to make to your chronicle of the war.  


**TESTIMONY OF URSULA, LATELY OF THE PRIESTS' HOUSE OF KORETIA**

To Brian son of Cossus, Royal Clerk to the Chara of Emor: 

Oh, dear. Did you spend many sleepless hours searching for the least offensive title you could apply to me? You should know me better than that, Brian. I'm not afraid to acknowledge my past, much less my present. 

At any rate, I'm happy to give you the background of how matters stood at the beginning of Koretia's war with Daxis, though I don't know why you're asking me; my brother and my husband know far more than I do. For that matter, the Jackal could give you an exact count of every man killed in the war. Including the many he killed himself. 

(I shouldn't say that, I know. He sorrows for every man he kills. And then he eats them, as their god. I really don't understand the Jackal – either the god or the man who embodies the god. But I love him more than I can say.) 

At any rate, the war was over something unimportant, as men's wars always are – something to do with both our lands wanting to own the mountain that stands between our capitals. As though _rocks_ mattered, compared to the lives of men and women and children! (Please don't forget about the women and children, when it comes time for you to write this down. Historians always do, when they're telling their tales of gallant warriors falling in battle.) 

So the King of Daxis was blustering, and our Jackal was snarling back, and then the Jackal went away to the border, and when he came back he smelt of the blood of the men he'd killed. You can imagine how hard it was to help him clean _that_ off! (Those tales of gallant warriors never speak of how difficult it is to remove blood from clothing.) And we only had moments in which to grasp why he'd killed – it was because of the Princess of Daxis, you know, only officially she wasn't a princess, because her parents had never married. 

I can see you blushing again, even though you're miles away, in Emor. You should really know me better, Brian. I've never been embarrassed to talk about such things, ever since the Jackal told me of my own origins, when I was a child. 

At any rate, the Daxions complicate matters of marriage a great deal, because they have two forms of marriage: public marriage and marriage "in the song," in which a man and woman privately sing their vows of loyalty to each other. And what we learned later was that Serva's father had sung his vow of marriage to Serva's mother – even though he was already pledged to marry someone else! – and so he was married twice, and his first marriage, to his slave-lover, produced Serva, while his second marriage, to his Queen, didn't produced any heirs. 

As I say, it's all very complicated, but apparently Serva couldn't inherit the throne – even though women usually _can_ , in Daxis – because her parents hadn't been publicly married. But her cousin Richard, who became the King's heir, was worried that Serva would marry someone powerful who would steal the throne from him. So he persuaded the King to attack Koretia, because the King had become obsessed with the idea that the Jackal had stolen Serva in order to force her to marry him. (As though the Jackal would marry anyone. King Leofwin was so silly to think that.) But of course, Prince Richard knew the truth, which was that Serva had fled from Daxis in order to escape _him_ , because he was going to rid her of any chance of marrying someone else by raping her— 

Please don't blush, Brian. I told you I'm not afraid of talking of such things. 

At any rate, this was how my brother entered into the story. Speaking of which, have you received any word of him? 

With fond thoughts of you,  
Ursula  


**CHAPTER ONE**

When dawn arrived, I was making my way through the streets of the Koretian capital, rushing to catch up with Perry. 

So intent was I to keep up with the swift-moving thief that I barely had time to attend to my surroundings after we passed through the city's west gate. I caught glimpses of crooked houses built of timber rather than brick or stone; large windows with broad ledges, long enough for a man to lie on; and narrow alleyways that wound aimlessly like tiny rivulets before pouring out into the broad streams of the main roads. In the southern portion of the circular city stood a black marble building that must have been the palace, but this I saw only from a distance, for the Jackal's palace was atop a broad, tree-flecked hill that was encircled by a wide, stone-lined moat. We passed a wooden bridge that led to the palace grounds, but this was lined by spear-bearing soldiers on both ends. 

My lingering glance at the palace caused me to fall behind Perry, who had silently led me through the countryside, from the border to the city. The closer we came to the city, the faster his pace had increased, until now, as the greyness of dawn began to dissipate, and people began to appear on the streets, it was all I could do to keep up. 

As we entered one of the narrow alleyways, Perry halted so suddenly that I nearly slammed into his back. I peered over his shoulder and saw that blocking our way was a boy, about twelve years of age, barefoot and in torn clothes, holding up his hands and saying, "Serve the gods by showing mercy to the poor, kind sir. Will you give me some money so that I might break my fast?" 

Perry did not reply, but his one eye remained fixed on the boy, and his hand went down to his belt-purse. He emptied the coins in it into his hand and held the coins there for a moment while the pleased boy took a step forward and held up his hands higher. Then Perry deliberately dropped all of the money into the gutter to the side of us. 

The boy, who seemed not to care where his money came from, immediately dived into the gutter to retrieve the coins from the filth there. I would have knelt down to help him, but Perry was already walking on without looking back to see whether I was following. As the alleyway broadened, I caught up to his side and looked at his face. His chin was high, but there was a look in his eye that I recognized from our first meeting. 

Not arrogance, I decided, but extreme shyness – that was the meaning of the encounter which had just taken place. This also explained Perry's tendency to stop and stand to the side whenever we encountered anyone in the road, even in the broader alleys. Suppressing the uneasiness I felt at the thought of the beggar-boy sifting through the filth to find his money, I followed Perry into one of the little Koretian houses. 

The house was very dark. The large window facing the street was shuttered, and Perry made no move to pull the boards back. Dimly, though, I could see that the house was cozily furnished. On the wall above the cold hearth hung several face-sized god-masks; I recognized a mask bearing the Jackal's features, but the other masks were differently decorated, and I remembered that the Koretians worshipped several gods and goddesses. Beside the hearth stood a cradle with a delicately woven linen blanket, while at the other end of the room, in an alcove, was a bed and wooden chest. In between all of these were a trestle-table and benches, pots and other kitchenware, a shield hanging on the wall, and – this provided the most domestic touch – a baby's teething rag lying on a stool. 

Perry was watching me, evidently waiting for me to comment, so I asked, "Is this your house?" 

He shook his head. "It belonged to the Jackal before he became ruler. Now his subcommander lives here." 

For a moment, I thought he must be joking; this tiny little cottage was no house for a high army official, much less a ruler-to-be. But Perry's face remained serious, so I said, "And the Jackal lives at the palace?" I went to the back of the house and looked through the window. Beyond the walled garden and the surrounding houses, I could just see the palace on the hill. "What an enormous moat he has." 

"It's because of the fire." Something about the tone of Perry's voice caused me to look up. He was bending over a small chest near the back door of the house, bringing out bread and wine. "When the Emorians invaded here at the end of the Border Wars, they tried burning part of the city in order to force us to surrender, but the fire destroyed the whole city. After the Jackal became ruler, one of the first things he did was hire Emorian engineers to come and build a moat around the palace grounds. He believes that, if there is ever a fire again, the palace grounds are large enough that everyone in the city can flee there." He looked up from the chest. "You must be hungry." 

"To sing the truth," I said, "I'm not hungry, but I'm very tired. I've hardly slept for the past two nights." 

"Why don't you sleep now?" Perry suggested. "It may be a while before the Jackal arrives." 

I certainly hoped that it was. The Jackal's words of vengeance against the murderers of Andrew were still ringing in my ears. I was not at all sure that I wanted to meet the terrifying Koretian ruler again. I stepped toward the bed, and Perry shut the curtain to the alcove with a rapidity which suggested that he too wanted to be alone with his thoughts. 

As I pulled off Andrew's cloak and set down the encased harp I had carried from Daxis, I reflected that my future now depended on a ruler whose greatest knowledge of me was that I had caused his spy's death. I had depended too much, I realized, on Andrew's kindness and on his willingness to help me. Now I was not sure what I would do in this land; I felt as impotent as a eunuch. There was Perry . . . But Perry, despite his initial friendliness, had made no offer to help me in my plight. Perhaps he too blamed me for Andrew's death. Since Andrew had died while helping me escape over the border, there was no reason that Perry and Jackal should not blame me for the death of so skilled and generous a man. 

Certainly I did. 

I curled up on the bed and fell asleep immediately. I was indeed tired, but more than that I was determined to escape from the horrors and grief of the previous days, as well as my fears about the future. 

o—o—o

Something woke me some time later. I opened my eyes, expecting to find myself in the slave-quarters in which I had lived for thirty years. It took me a moment to orient myself. Then I remembered: I was in Koretia, safe from the Prince unless the Jackal should decide to send me back because of what had happened to Andrew. . . . This fear had not occurred to me before, and I thrust it swiftly aside. I lay in the bed for a while, listening to the sounds around me: the clucking of hens in some nearby garden, the soft chatter of people on the street, and the low rumble of thunder in the distance. I could not hear the sound of Perry in the next room. Perhaps, having fulfilled his duty to bring me here, he had left me in this house to await the Jackal's return. Or perhaps he had gone to tell Andrew's family and friends what had happened. I remembered that Perry had mentioned that he would have to tell Andrew's blood brother. This could be the same blood brother that Andrew had told me about in my father's dungeon. If he had known Andrew since they were children, the man named John would probably be much grieved by the news of Andrew's death. Perry might be some time in returning. 

I heard a rapping sound, and after a moment I realized that it came from the front door to the house; I realized too that this was the sound that had woken me before. Somebody was waiting for the door to be answered, perhaps the Jackal. I scrambled to my feet and began to pull back the alcove curtain, then stopped. 

Light was shining through the cracks of the house at the opposite angle to when I had fallen asleep. It must be afternoon now. In the darkest corner of the room, the one directly opposite to the front door, Perry was standing with his back to the mask-laden hearth. He was in fact directly against the hearth, with his left, burnt hand raised up to touch the mask of the Jackal, but his gaze was on the door. I supposed that he was only wondering whether he ought to answer the door when this was not his house, but there was something odd about the way he stared at the barred door with great intensity, as though willing away the intruder. 

The knock came a third time. This time it was accompanied by a low voice saying, "Perry, are you there? It's Durand." 

Now, finally, Perry walked forward toward the door, but slowly, as though he were unsure as to whether friend or enemy lay beyond the wooden door. He pulled up the bolt, but rather than open the door, he backed away from the doorway until he was in the corner where he had been before. I heard the sound of the latch rising, and the door opened, but the visitor did not enter. Instead, he started talking rapidly to Perry. 

He was speaking to Perry so quickly in Koretian that I could not follow what he was saying; my knowledge of Andrew's native tongue was not as great as that. After a time, I recalled that Andrew had mentioned a man named Durand as someone I could go to in time of danger. I stepped forward— 

—and halted. In all likelihood, I realized, Durand was one of Andrew's fellow "thieves," as the Jackal called his spies. If Durand had worked alongside Andrew, he was as likely to blame me for Andrew's death as Perry and the Jackal were. 

Perry had not noticed me standing in the alcove. He was leaning against the corner with his left cheek against the wall. I turned and made my way back through the darkness of the alcove to the bed, where I curled up once more. 

The voice stopped, the door closed, and after a minute I heard the curtain drawn back. I kept my eyes closed, sensing that it was better to pretend that I had been asleep all the while and had not witnessed this peculiar scene. I waited for Perry to wake me with a word or a touch – and then I jolted into a sitting position as something clattered on the wooden floor near me. 

Perry was standing against the wall of the alcove with his cloak over one arm, watching me silently. A short distance from him was his sword, which he had evidently dashed to the ground in order to get my attention. Still trembling from the surprise, I said, "Why did you do _that_?" 

His hurt look immediately mollified me. I remembered that this quiet spy, however eccentric, had just helped to save me from death. "I'm sorry," I said. "I woke too suddenly. What is it?" 

Perry reached forward in a tentative fashion with his foot to slide the sword toward him. As he picked it up and resheathed it, he said softly, "The Jackal has issued his hunting cry to all of the thieves in the city. I must return to the palace." 

"And I'm to wait here?" I folded my arms around my legs, feeling relief that the Koretian ruler had returned safely from the border. At least I would not have _his_ death on my conscience. 

"I'm not sure," he said as he ducked his head, probably in an attempt to get a better view of me in the dark. "He put out the call of pursuit; that means he needs our help to fight an immediate danger. I'm not sure whether the danger is at the palace or elsewhere, and I don't know whether the Jackal will even be there to ask when I arrive. He told Durand where I and the other thieves were, but he was too busy to send any individual messages. Since I don't know whether the Jackal wants me to bring you with me, I think I should follow his previous instructions and have you stay here. Perhaps he plans to come fetch you himself." 

"That suits me well enough," I replied, lying back down onto the bed. "I suppose that I ought to be well-rested by now, but I think the effects of the past couple of days are just catching up with me. I'll be glad to sleep some more." 

He nodded, began to walk away, and then said hesitantly, "Would you like me to leave my sword?" 

I forced myself to laugh, though it took effort. I had no certainty that anyone would return for me, and why should they? In my selfish attempt to save my own life, I had destroyed the Jackal's best spy. A man unlike any other I had ever known, or ever would know. "Swordplay isn't one of the skills I've learned over the years," I replied. "Besides, I doubt that the Prince will pursue me this far. I don't have anything to fear, now that I'm in Koretia." 

I suppose that I have made more foolish statements in my life, but that is the one I remember most, because of what happened afterwards. 

o—o—o

It took time for me to return to sleep. 

I lay awake, running in my mind over all the conversations I'd held with Andrew. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that I had caused the death of an extraordinary man. Not simply because he was a talented spy, though the Jackal's anger over his death showed how valuable Andrew had been to that ruler. No, even if he had continued to live the life of a slave, as Andrew had once told me he was, I thought that something about the man would have marked Andrew as a divine instrument for good. 

And now he was dead. Because I had chosen to live, a divine man was gone. 

And so I wept myself to sleep. It was not something I had done since I was a child. After a certain age, it takes much to force a slave to cry. But Andrew would have wanted me to cry, I dimly recalled. He had warned me against closing myself off from such emotions. So I wept, and I slept, and I dreamt. 

Dimly in my dream, I heard the voices. They were calling to each other, men and women, young and old, excitedly talking in a language which I was too sleepy to understand. Then the voices faded, a rumble began to grow, and I heard two cracks like those from a whip wielded by an angry slave-keeper. 

I opened my eyes and saw nothing but blackness. 

Groping my way out of bed, I finally found the front door of the house, pulled back the bolt, and opened the iron-bound door wide. The darkness, I quickly realized, was caused not only by night's arrival but also by tenebrous storm clouds that had gathered in the sky above. Only a soft glow toward the west whispered the reminder of the sun. Oddly enough, the same glow seemed to occur in the east as well. I stood by the empty street, listening to the low rumble of the rain-heavy clouds and watching a nearby tree sway with increasing franticness in the wind. Then I began to hear music. 

It came from the east, swelling like the wind into an exultant thrust of song. It spoke, in its very melody, of charging, pounding, crushing. It hammered through the air like a battering ram, it gathered energy like a fist about to strike, and then it swooped past me in the form of grey-uniformed soldiers. 

Their voices raised high in song, the Daxion soldiers were evidently eager to meet their enemy. They raced past me so quickly that I barely had time to recognize one or two men whom I had seen at my father's army headquarters. Their blades were unsheathed, some already stained with blood, others still pure and untouched. A few of the soldiers were missing their swords or their shields, but they ran alongside their comrades with no fear. Their voices were beginning to rise higher as they approached the victory portion of the song. No Koretians blocked their path, and though a few of the soldiers paused to kick doors in, the dwellers in this part of the city had evidently already fled their homes, for the soldiers shrugged and continued on toward the light at the west end of the city. 

The thunder of their footsteps was beginning to die down when a straggler appeared, a soldier so young that he was still growing his beard. His shield was missing, but he had an unsullied sword in his hand. His eyes were wide with excitement, and he was singing loudly. Then he stopped suddenly, having sighted me in the doorway. 

A smile appeared on his face. For a moment, I thought that he would ask me to join him in his victory song. Then he began to run toward me, his blade still naked. 

It was then that I realized, too late, what danger I was in. 

I stepped back inside the house and tried to swing the door closed, but he pushed it back easily and pinned me up against the wall with one hand, holding his sword loosely with the other hand. "Wait, pretty Koretian," he said with a grin. "You haven't greeted your new master yet." 

He spoke in Daxion and could not have expected me to understand. His hand, slipping down to pull up my tunic, spoke the language that is understood everywhere by women caught in war. Yet as he moved, I noticed a faint uncertainty in his eye, and his hand fumbled as though he were not quite sure of the proper procedure for this. 

I was on the point of spinning into a greater panic than I had known since the night that I woke to find one of the King's guards atop me, tearing at my clothes. But seeing that uncertainty in the man's expression saved me. Gathering together my wits, I said in icy Daxion, "Take your hands off of me." 

His hand froze where it was. He stared at me, gaping, before saying, "You're Daxion." 

Until this moment, I had not decided for certain what I was: whether I was a Daxion in temporary exile or an emigrant to Koretia. But now, with a firmness that came from not having to think the matter through, I said, "I'm a servant of the Spirit. So let me go; I'm not your enemy." 

He considered this matter with perplexity wrinkling his brow. It was clear that the informal instructions he had received in raping did not include what to do if you capture the wrong victim. Finally he said with a smile, "All the better. You should be happy that we've captured the city and will want to celebrate." 

I tried to push him away, but his body was pressed firmly against mine. Trying not to sound as desperate as I felt, I said, "Don't be a fool. If you want to prove your manhood, then show that you have the wisdom of a man. A true man woos his woman with love, not with a blade." 

The soldier looked at me with doubtful eyes. His sword was now close to slipping from his hand. "Look, just give me a kiss," he pleaded. "That's all I want." 

One kiss, I was sure, would be a victory so sweet that he would demand more. I tried again to thrust him away from my chest. Then he moved suddenly, spinning away from me and landing with his back against the wall as the tip of his own sword settled upon the ball of his throat. 

The grey-uniformed man holding the young soldier's blade looked darkly upon his prisoner for a moment. His tunic was covered in dirt, and a large tear in it exposed part of his chest, which was covered with dried blood. There was blood on his head too, black on the bandage he wore there. Clapping my hand across my mouth to suppress a scream, I stared mutely at the man, as though I had met a death spirit that had arisen from its ash-tomb. 

Over the growing rumble outside, Andrew said softly in Daxion, "Two facts you should know. One is that you are still alive only because you took the trouble to ask for what you wanted. Let that be a lesson to you that politeness receives its reward. The second fact is that you will not remain alive for long unless you start running now. There is fire in this city, both in the east and in the west, and it is closing in on us. Run to the south, toward the palace moat. That is the only escape left." 

The soldier made a gurgling sound in his throat, as though protesting the fact that all of his training was come to nothing. As Andrew withdrew the blade, the soldier jerked away from his captor and fled out the door. 

"Andrew," I whispered. "How did you—?" 

He shook his head, threw the sword to the ground, and pulled me by hand toward the back of the house, saying, "No time. I saw the fire starting when I was coming down Council Hill, where the palace is located. The fire is trapping the Daxion soldiers and will kill us as well if we don't move quickly. We must get to the moat before the bridge is raised." 

He spoke these words in snatches, for he had already opened the back door of the house. We were now running hand in hand through the low-walled garden. The sky glowed red, and wood-scented smoke drifted over us like low mist. I realized that the growing rumble came not from the storm clouds, which still hung ponderously over us, but from the fire approaching us on both sides. We were surrounded by wooden houses, but straight ahead of us, resting upon its high hill, stood the marble palace that overlooked the city. 

The garden gate was locked. Andrew opened it with a crash of his boot; then we raced through the smoke-dark streets. The fire was beginning to shout in our ears now. I coughed from soot in my throat. Andrew, continuing his straight path south, dodged suddenly to avoid a burning timber that had fallen from a nearby house. He dragged me aside as he did so, and we ended up into an alley whose entrance was soon blocked behind us by fire eating its way toward us. After a quick glance at me to ascertain that I had not been hurt, Andrew pulled me once more forward, down the narrow, doorless street that was scattered with merchants' crates. The alley jogged slightly at the end – and there we found ourselves facing a tall, stone wall. 

Andrew said something pithy under his breath. His head was tilted upwards, trying to ascertain how far we had to climb. Over the roar of the fire, I shouted, "What is this?" 

"A bit of the old palace wall," Andrew replied, his gaze fixed on the immobile stones before him. "Most of it was torn down when the moat was built, but the Jackal kept part of it as a place for soldiers to keep lookout. The moat is on the other side of it." He let go of my hand, drew back a few paces, then ran forward and jumped toward the top of the wall. His fingers just caught the edge of the wall, and then he slipped down again. He landed with a thud that sent him to his knees. 

I hurried over to help him up. "We could pile some crates on top of each other!" I shouted over the flame-rumble. But as I looked back over my shoulder, I saw sparks flying out from the length of the alley where we had just run. 

Andrew said nothing. He was looking toward the top of the wall again. As I followed his gaze, I saw that a man was standing there, outlined black against the grey clouds. He fell onto his stomach and put his arms over the edge of the wall, holding them down toward us. Without speaking, Andrew swept me into his arms and started pushing me up the length of the wall, like a miller trying to push a bag of grain onto the top of his store. I reached up to the waiting hands, felt them draw me upwards, and in the moment before I was hauled onto the top of the wall, I recognized my savior as the young soldier. 

He held me only long enough to place me to the side; then he was on his stomach again, waiting for Andrew. Andrew stepped back and looked up at us; then, like a cat springing forward, he raced toward and up the wall. 

This time the soldier caught him, so precariously that I think both of them might have fallen back down into the alley, but I had already grabbed onto the soldier's legs. There was a struggle, as though the soldier was a fisherman trying to land a particularly squirmy fish. Finally he pulled Andrew onto the wall. All three of us lay for a while where we were, trying to regain our breath in the smoky air. 

Having done the least work, I recovered the quickest. I rose to my feet to look around me. From this vantage point, I could see that the two halves of the city fire had begun to close in on each other, like a wound that is healing. No escape lay to the north, where the city wall stood high and gateless. Yet in the small gap remaining between the fires, a grey line of soldiers was fleeing desperately and hopelessly toward that wall. 

I turned away quickly and looked toward the south. Some soldiers had had sense enough to run in this direction; the first of them were just reaching the moat. Lining the other side of the moat were soldiers in black uniforms. Some of the Koretian soldiers were in the process of pulling at a large, heavy wheel. As I watched, the wooden bridge over the moat rose into the air like the petals of a flower closing at night. The Daxion soldiers who had just reached the moat were left helpless, staring at the wide expanse of water. 

Beside me, Andrew said, "The Jackal left orders that the palace grounds should be defended to the death, since that's where all the city dwellers are now. He intended the moat to be a final line of defense in case the city gates should be breached – but he didn't anticipate anything like this happening." 

Faintly, I heard the screams of the Daxion soldiers who had turned and were trying to fight their way back through the voracious fire. Looking over at the hill, I saw that the palace grounds were crowded with people. At this distance, they looked like ants standing amongst grass blades. I could hear their murmur rising like smoke, punctuated at intervals by the shouted orders of the black-tunicked Koretian soldiers. Then something bit at my arm. I turned to see the fire angrily rising toward us from the houses to the north of the palace wall. 

The young soldier looked uneasily at us, obviously uncertain as to whether he should trust us, but equally uncertain of what to do. Andrew was looking toward both ends of the wall, but if the soldier had reached the top of the wall by means of stairs, those stairs were now in flames. The fire was battering against the back of the wall; in front of the wall was a short, wood-planked wharf, but it too was now being eaten on both sides by fire. I thought of the harp I had left behind in the house, and I felt a pang of pain at the loss of Rosetta's gift. 

A muffled thump occurred within the growl of the fire. It came from Andrew, who had just jumped to the ground below. He fell to his hands as well as his knees, and stayed in that position for a moment, as though he had been stunned. Then he rose to his feet and raised his arms. 

Once more, I felt myself jerked off my feet, this time by the young soldier. Without preliminary, he dropped me into Andrew's waiting arms. I felt a lightness, then a jolting, and then Andrew staggered under my sudden weight. I pulled myself quickly out of his arms, nearly stepping into the path of the soldier, who had jumped down beside us. 

Andrew took a step toward the water, which was blood-red like the sky. It was as wide as a small lake and looked as deep as one. The growing storm-winds were buffeting it with waves. The soldiers on the other side of the moat appeared small. The fire was now so loud that I could no longer hear their shouts. 

Andrew asked, "Can you swim?" 

I shook my head wordlessly. The young soldier said, "I can't." 

"Splendid," said Andrew. "Neither can I; we'll enter the Land Beyond together. Jump!" He grabbed my hand and pulled me over the edge, just as the first flames of death reached out to caress our bodies.


	2. Chapter 2

The water was warm as a womb; I supposed that the fire was acting like a hearth-fire upon the moat-pot that held the water. I travelled further and further down into the water. Then I realized that this was no womb but a tomb. Although my body had not yet been turned to ashes, I was about to be interred. 

This thought caused me to begin kicking my legs and arms, pushing backwards against the night-dark waters. I could only trust that this would bring me to the surface, for I was blind in this place; tomb-earth could not have been so black. The life-breath in me started to seep away, turning into bubbles that made the only sound of my death. 

Then light and sound burst onto me suddenly as my head broke water. Chance rather than skill had brought me up against the side of the moat. I tried to cling against the wall, but it rose straight up and was slippery with algae. The top of the moat was far above my head. All that I could see between me and the fire above were a set of iron boat-rings high up on the wall, beyond my grasp. 

One of my feet, still kicking wildly, discovered a small ledge against the wall, where the moat wall suddenly jutted outward. At first, I thought I had found my salvation, but the ledge was too small to hold me by itself, and as I tried to push my feet onto it, the top half of my body fell backwards, as though the moat wall had shrugged me off. Taken by surprise, I fell into the water open-mouthed, and the water thrust itself into my throat. 

The next thing I felt was something hard and painful around my waist. Then I heard someone coughing and wheezing and realized that it was myself. As the air began to rush back into my lungs, I opened my eyes and found myself in Andrew's arms. 

In one arm, at least; Andrew's other arm was upraised so that he could grasp one of the iron rings that were out of my reach. Searching with my foot, I found the ledge against the moat wall and rested my feet against it, taking some of the weight off Andrew's arm. I could feel that his feet had found refuge there as well. Placing my arm around Andrew's waist, I looked up at his face, which was red under the light of the fire. His gaze went past me to the wall beside me. Turning my head, I saw that the Daxion soldier had also managed to grasp one of the rings; he too was clinging to this precarious perch. 

The roar of fire burst in upon us like a thunderclap. I did not even have to raise my head to know that the fire had reached the edge of the wharf, for tiny flames were pouring over the side like drops from a waterfall. Andrew pulled both of us flatter against the wall. Though a few sparks landed on us, we were now drenched with water, so the fire did us no harm. Looking up, I was just in time to see a piece of wood detach itself from the wharf and dive straight for my face. 

The sound of my involuntary cry was cut off abruptly by the thud of the wood against Andrew's arm as he raised it to shield me from the fire. He had let go of me in doing so, and though I was still clinging to his waist, I began to slide out of his grasp. Then his arm reached down to grasp me once more, and I caught a brief glimpse of the fire-mark on his arm before his hand went under the water to grab hold of me. 

The water was up to Andrew's chest and nearly up to my shoulders; the air above us was burning-hot from the fire, and the water was beginning to feel icy by comparison. Great clouds of black smoke drifted above us, but the moat was day-bright from the light of the fire. As I watched, the light dimmed somewhat, and the roar subsided to a growl, but flames still licked above us. 

I lifted my head cautiously, trying to judge the distance we would have to climb to reach the wharf. Sensing my thoughts, Andrew spoke above the sound of the fire. "No. The moat wall is too slippery, and we wouldn't be safe up there until the fires have died out." 

"Well," I said, trying to wring my thoughts clear of all distractions, as though I were purging a floor-cloth of its dirty water, "perhaps a piece of wood will float by, something we can use to help keep us afloat till we reach the other side—" 

"No," said Andrew shortly. He did not bother to explain himself this time: his gaze, dark and cold like the waters that clutched at us, was fixed on the scene before us. I turned my head to look. 

The moat was crowded with swimming men, the sound of their splashing obscured by the thunder and fire and waves. They crawled their way through the water like desperate, wet rats, a few travelling with practiced strokes, most floundering in unfamiliar terrain. Nearby, a soldier clawed at the sky, as though trying to catch hold of the stars as a place of safety. Another soldier, seeing his plight, curved his path in order to reach the drowning soldier. He shouted something to the first soldier, perhaps an instruction, perhaps merely a reassuring call that help was on its way. But the first soldier was too filled with blind fear to notice. The moment that his savior came near him, he clutched the second soldier's neck in a stranglehold, dragging the man down with him into the deep waters. Neither man resurfaced. 

I felt something clutch my own throat, keeping me from breathing normally. Then my breath gasped in as something long and pointed plunged into the water just beyond us. It was a spear. It had been thrown by the Koretian soldiers on the opposite shore. 

Like water drops in a rainstorm, the missiles came at sparse intervals at first, and then began to pelt down with furious rapidity. Several landed nearby, obviously aimed at us, but we were just short of the spears' range. Instead, with deadly precision, the spears reached the closer targets: the Daxion soldiers toiling through the waves. Unable to turn away, unable to move quickly in the thick water, unable to defend themselves, the Daxion soldiers were one by one harpooned and disappeared into the water that was now truly blood-red. 

We watched this silently as I clamped my lips shut and tried to swallow the sickness in my mouth. Finally I said fiercely, "You'd think that they'd allow the soldiers to surrender. You'd think that they would grant them that much mercy." 

"It's a difficult decision to make." Andrew's voice was cool, detached. When I looked up at him, his face was as hard as dry mortar. "When the Jackal was forced to lead his forces into battle against the Prince's attack today, he left only Koretia's Home Division to defend the city. The rest of the army is out in the countryside, trying to push the Daxions back to the border." 

"We sneaked by them," the young soldier said unexpectedly. His wary look had not lessened, but I saw his arm shaking as he strove to hold onto the boat-ring, and I guessed that he was eager to bind himself in some way to his companions in death. "The Jackal was expecting our vanguard to attack the city, so the Prince kept him distracted by attacking him with the vanguard. Meanwhile, my division slipped past." 

Andrew nodded as though thanking a royal messenger for his news; then he concluded, "There aren't enough soldiers on the palace grounds to defend the people if more than a few subdivisions of Daxions reach the shore, so the Koretians have chosen to take no chances." 

I thought it odd that he spoke of the people of his own land in such a detached manner, almost as though he were a god staring down at the Three Lands from above and watching our human battles with dispassionate eyes. I stared at him, trying to read his expression through the sheet of water covering his face. Then I noticed that some of the water was red. 

"Andrew!" I said. "Your head!" 

He did not move as I reached up to touch where his bandage had been, and where the blood was now once more oozing forth. "I know," he said quietly. 

"Does it hurt?" I asked, pulling my scarlet-tipped fingers back. 

"I'm fine," he said without replying to my question. Then, seeing me continue to look at him, he added reflectively, "I'm feeling somewhat dizzy." 

"Here," said the young soldier. "Let me hold her." He reached out his free arm toward me. 

Andrew did not hesitate but passed me over into the embrace of the soldier. As the soldier hugged me close to his chest, silence fell over us both. Then the soldier said with a hesitant smile, "My name is Marius." 

"I'm Serva," I replied. I had never imagined that I would speak politely to a would-be rapist, but it was becoming more and more clear that this young man was ill-fitted for that role. I looked over at Andrew to see whether he would introduce himself, but once again his gaze was clasped by the scene on the opposite shore. In his usual taut voice, he said, "We seem to be attracting attention." 

Marius and I turned our heads to look. The water in front of us was still but for the slap of the waves. Nothing filled the moat now except occasional dark shapes floating by on the bloody grave-water. Directly opposite to us was a wharf lined with small boats; the wharf was squeezed between a hut and a squat tower, and was lined with a dozen black-tunicked soldiers spread at irregular intervals. In between them, clustering like multi-colored pebbles on a shore, were civilian men, women, and even children. I could not see their faces, but their gestures made clear that we were the focus of their attention. 

"Could you call to them?" I asked suddenly. "You could tell them you work for the Jackal." But even as I spoke, my words were nearly swallowed by the boom of the thunder and the continued roar of the fire. 

Andrew shook his head. "The soldiers wouldn't let me get close enough for that." 

Marius gave Andrew another uneasy glance, opened his mouth, and then evidently decided that he would rather not pursue the riddle of this grey-uniformed man. Instead, he said, "Look at them. They're like carrion crows. I'll bet they're taking wagers on how long it will be before we drown." 

"They'd better settle their wagers soon, then." Andrew's voice was steady and composed, but I saw him reach up and grip the boat-ring with his other hand. 

Marius and I exchanged looks. Underneath his firm grip on me, I could feel that Marius was continuing to tremble; I too was shaking from the chill of the water. We continued to gaze at each other. Then, having reached silent agreement with our eyes, we opened our mouths and began to pour out together the song that a Daxion normally sings only once. 

I had heard the song many times at my father's army hospital. It was a simple melody with short, cyclical lyrics, custom-shaped for any Daxion who might be barely conscious when the Spirit bid him sing it. Marius and I shouted the song as loud as we could over the blare of the fire and storm, calling forth our farewells to our friends and kin, and greeting with joy the Spirit who was awaiting us at the gates to the Land Beyond. With voices more defiant than the attacking soldiers' had been, we sang to the limits of our power the bright, peaceful words of our Death Song. 

We would have sung to the end, I think, but as we paused for breath at one point, Andrew said quietly, "Your song appears to be much appreciated by your audience." 

He had not joined his voice with ours, though we had sung the simple words so many times that he must have had them memorized by now. Once again, I followed his gaze over to the shoreline. I saw that the soldiers were now all gathered in a cluster, evidently discussing us. Their discussion, it seemed, was being joined by the city dwellers who surrounded them. Faintly, working its way painfully through the fire's shout, their upraised voices reached our ears. 

"They're probably figuring out how to shut us up," said Marius with sudden, harsh bitterness. "Koretians never appreciate the Spirit's power." Then he jerked his head nervously to look over at Andrew. As he did so, he slipped from his hold. 

I felt him thrust me away immediately, pushing me back to within reach of Andrew. As Andrew dragged me over to his side, I twisted in his grasp, trying to catch sight of Marius in the dark water. A wave spluttered into my eyes, blinding me. Above its sibilant sigh, Andrew said, "Hold tight." Then his arm released me, and I felt him straining outward, grabbing onto some heavy weight that threatened to drag us downwards. 

The tension eased; my eyes cleared, and I saw that Marius was pushing away Andrew's hold as he clawed his way up the slick wall to the iron ring. He grasped it with a trembling hand as Andrew's arm pulled my head clear of the water. And then, as though nothing had happened, we were as we had been at the start, but I could feel the weariness dragging at Andrew's muscles like a crying child. 

I looked up at Andrew. Above his head, the sagging clouds continued to grumble and hold fast to their store of water. Thunderbolts weaved across them like jagged, white threads. I smelt rain in the air and tasted moat-water tinged with blood. The wind swooped down upon us, stirring Andrew's hair and revealing the gash in his head. His gaze drifted down to me slowly, lightly, as though he were surprised to see me there. With his voice clipped even tighter than usual, he said, "Serva, I am going to have to give you back to Marius." 

I felt a blade cut at my throat as I stared at his dark, unwavering eyes and understood what he was telling me. For a moment, I did not react. Then, as I felt his muscles begin to shift in preparation for the transfer, I pulled myself suddenly upward and kissed him on the mouth. 

His lips were chapped dry like late-summer fields, as though the water could not penetrate that far. They lay impassive under mine, neither rejecting my kiss nor accepting it. But as I drew back, I saw a faint expression come onto his face, as though I had succeeded in chiselling a hole through the armor of his face. I knew then that he had recognized all that lay behind my kiss, just as I too had recognized it for the first time. I stared mutely at him, in the same manner that I had stared mutely at the Prince two days before, unsure of whether I had made matters better or worse for Andrew at this moment. 

Under the dying hush of the wind, he said softly, "Could you take off your brooch?" 

Puzzled, I managed to do with fumbling fingers. His arm shifted next to my body as his hand broke through water. I tried to place the brooch in his hand, but his palm withdrew, and then one finger, limp and cold to the touch, brushed past my hand and impaled itself on the brooch-pin. 

It withdrew, leaving a red stain on the pin that was immediately swept away by the water. Staring down at Andrew's glistening finger, I understood, and I turned the brooch in my hand, cutting my own finger with its sharp blade. Then his finger, now shaking, touched mine briefly, and our blood was mixed. 

I hastily repinned the brooch, lest it be swept out of my hand by the waves slapping against us. Andrew's muscles tensed once more, and I took one last look at his forever unreadable expression as his body shifted next to mine. As Andrew began to release me, I turned my head toward Marius. 

I found that he was paying no attention to us. This time it was he who had been following with gaping mouth the action on the opposite shore. I cast my gaze forth and murmured, "Spirit of Merciful Peace." 

Scrambling down a ladder on the opposite side of the moat, a man was making his way to one of the boats. Several of the soldiers ran forward, evidently trying to halt him, but they were held back by the city dwellers, who were shouting even louder than before. The man hastily lowered himself into a boat, untied the rope binding the vessel to the shore, and began rowing away. The soldiers, with exasperated gestures, succeeded in pushing the crowd back, and they rushed to the water's edge. One of them shouted something to the man, but the soldier's instruction was evidently without success. The boat continued steadily toward us. 

"Blessings of the Spirit," said Marius. "So the servants of the hunting god are willing to sing mercy after all." 

Andrew made no comment. He was gripping me painfully now, and I saw his fingers move on the boat-ring, sliding wider open. His gaze was fixed on the boat making its slow way toward us. 

"Can you hold on till he reaches us?" I asked. 

"Yes," he said in a voice so short that the word was finished almost before it was spoken. 

Without a word, Marius reached toward me. I pulled myself out of Andrew's grasp just at the moment that his hand began to slip off the boat-ring. Andrew caught the ring again with both his hands, and then continued to stare outward, his face as hard and inert as that of a death spirit. 

Marius was now singing softly the Song of Strife, that bleak ballad about a hero who must perform a dozen tasks for the Spirit, each worse than the last. The final task requires the hero to watch a sword slowly plunging down upon him and to trust that the Spirit will rescue him. Patience, the ballad says, is the hardest labor of all. 

By the time Marius had reached the fifth task, Andrew's hands were beginning to bloom open again; by the time Marius had reached the eighth task, Andrew's eyes were closed, and his arms were shaking as hard as the trees on the windswept hill before us. 

The boat reached us during the eleventh task. It was piloted by a scrawny, elderly man with grey hair that flew in all directions as though he had been hit by a thunderbolt. He grinned at us with a tooth-gapped smile, seemingly without fear, and guided the boat over to Andrew, having identified from afar which of us was in greatest danger. Andrew did not even notice that the boat was there until it brushed against him. He opened his eyes then, but looked at the boat vaguely, as though trying to ascertain its purpose. After a short pause, Andrew's body jerked as he just avoided slipping into the water once more. Then, like an acrobat performing a difficult trick, he clambered onto the boat. The boatman was watching Andrew in a vigilant manner that suggested that he expected the landlubberly soldier to overturn his vessel at any moment, but Andrew drew himself onto the boat cautiously, knelt for a moment at the far end, and collapsed onto his face. 

I barely noticed how Marius and the boatman managed to get me onto the boat. All I can remember is crying, "Are you all right?" 

"I'm fine." Andrew's muffled voice was as level as a plane marker, but he did not move until I touched his arm. Sagging like a waterlogged hull, he allowed me to pull him up into a sitting position. His eyes were closed and his breath heavy; I quickly pulled his head into the hollow of my shoulder. He made no resistance. His body was limp and chilled. 

Marius had boarded the boat in the meantime. He began to scan the vessel with the practiced eye of a soldier who has been taught how to forage. The boatman, who might perhaps have encountered this calculating look during previous wars, reached under the bench upon which he was sitting and pulled out a roughly woven blanket. He handed it to me. As I wrapped it around Andrew, I said in my best Koretian, "Thank you." 

"Oh, you speak our language." The boatman's face brightened. Without giving me a chance to reply, he said, "We thought at first that you might be a city woman, but then we heard you singing in Daxion, and we knew that the soldiers must have brought you with them. Our soldiers were debating whether they should come over here and rescue you, because you're a woman. And the rest of us were saying that all three of you ought to be rescued. We've never seen such bravery before, the way that your soldiers kept passing you back and forth, and how you kept saving each other from drowning, and how you even sang songs in order to cheer each other. But our soldiers – they have mud patties where they brains should be. They just kept saying that it was against orders. So we finally saw that it was up to us to help you. Those soldiers . . ." The boatman fell into a paroxysm of laughter. "We fooled them good. They were furious! I've never seen men so angry! It was the funniest thing . . ." The rest of his words were lost as his laughter turned to hiccups. 

As he spoke, he had been rowing the heavily laden boat toward the opposite shore, his thin arms straining against the load. Marius, after an initial, puzzled look, had paid no attention to the Koretian speech he could not understand. But now, almost as though commenting on the speech, he murmured, "I wish I had my blade." 

His attention was focussed on the shoreline. The crowd had been pressed back by five of the soldiers so that the tight gap between the hut and the tower was now inhabited only by the other soldiers, who were lined up against the wharf, their naked swords flashing with thunderbolt light. As we came closer, I could see the grim looks on their faces. Without thinking, I squeezed Andrew tightly. He stirred, but his eyes remained closed. 

The boatman was still laughing when we reached the wharf. "I got them!" he shouted up to the soldiers as he tied the boat. "I fooled you good! You, with your overgrown toy blades and your minds as thick as Daxion marshland . . ." He burst into another peel of hiccuped hilarity. 

One of the soldiers above us said sharply, "Send up the woman first." 

I looked at Andrew, whose damp, bloody head was still resting above my breast, but he remained oblivious to his surroundings. Marius looked uneasily from the soldier to me, unsure of what the shout meant. As I began to slide away, he quickly came over to hold Andrew upright. Andrew's eyelids fluttered open, but the eyes beneath them were unfocussed and incognizant. 

With the help of the mirthful boatman, I scrambled up the slippery ladder. The soldiers caught me toward the top and pulled me peremptorily onto the wharf. The one who had spoken before, and who wore the green stripe of a lieutenant, said to me, "Daxion?" 

I nodded, and opened my mouth to explain, but I was immediately shoved into the waiting arms of a soldier. The edge of his blade came to rest against my belly. 

I shut my mouth quickly. It would be better, I thought, to let Andrew give the explanations. Perhaps he already knew these men, and his face alone would tell the soldiers what they needed to know. 

My back was to the city dwellers, but I could hear their protesting cries behind me, as well as comments on the soldiers' intelligence that were even less flattering than the boatman's had been. The wind shouted over their comments momentarily, slapping my damp clothes like winter sleet and sending the smell of wet wharf-wood spinning into the air. Above us, the clouds continued to make their grumbling threats, and the sky turned darker as the fire on the opposite shore began to subside, having run out of houses to burn. Nearby, the bridge was being lowered to allow over a black-tunicked horseman who had somehow made his way through the lingering fire. The flames shimmered like embers at dawn. Occasional shots of thunderbolts revealed the crumbled, blackened structures that had once been the Koretian capital. 

Marius was now being hauled roughly onto the wharf. The lieutenant stepped forward and said loudly to him, "If you fight, she dies. Understand?" 

His words, which brought forth an immediate storm of protest from the crowd, were spoken in Koretian, but the lieutenant's gestures made clear what he meant. Marius's eyes flicked only briefly toward me, standing with the blade against my body; then he nodded and allowed himself to be pulled to one side, where he was held by two soldiers. 

A soldier wearing the red trim of a sublieutenant suddenly dashed past me, skidding to a stop in front of the lieutenant. Gulping air, he said, "Sir, we can't hold them much longer. They're determined to help the Daxions." 

The lieutenant, pressing his hand to his forehead with a gesture that combined frustration with bewilderment, said, "Rastus, Schuyler – go help the sublieutenant with the crowd." 

One soldier immediately ran off. Behind me, my captor said hesitantly, "Sir, what should I do with my prisoner?" 

"Give her to the sublieutenant, curse you!" said the lieutenant, and then turned his attention back to the wharfside. The sublieutenant took me into his custody, seemingly unwilling to point out to his official that this action prevented him from returning to the crowd. To my relief, he did not unsheathe his sword, but simply held me in a grip no firmer than that of a maiden's escort. 

The lieutenant had halted Schuyler's departure with an impatient wave of the hand. At the lieutenant's sharp word, Schuyler came over to take hold of the boatman, who had climbed onto the wharf. The boatman had reached the peak of his amusement, and between hiccups was comparing the lieutenant to various moronic toddlers he had met during his lifetime. "Get this fool back with the others," the lieutenant told Schuyler, and then shouted at the two soldiers standing by the wharfside, "What in the names of the gods is the delay down there?" 

"The other Daxion seems to be having trouble climbing the ladder, sir," came the reply. 

"Well, then, help him up the ladder! God of Mercy." This last was spoken in an undertone to the sublieutenant as the lieutenant slammed his sword into his sheath. "Why did I ever accept the lieutenancy? I should be out plowing my father's land, not trying to resolve dilemmas like this." 

"You're doing fine," said the sublieutenant in a low, soothing voice. "Look, here's the last one." 

I turned my head and saw Andrew stumble his way onto the wharf. For a moment, his hand groped for support from the soldier next to him. Then his eyes rose slowly to look upon the lieutenant, who was glaring at him. 

It was as though a tree that had been felled by a storm found its roots again. Andrew's back straightened, his face grew hard, and his eyes glittered cold as he looked upon the soldier watching him with enmity. He opened his mouth, but the lieutenant cut him off, saying, "I hope you know Koretian, because I want an answer to one question: Why did you bring this woman with you?" 

The thunder cracked deafeningly at that moment, drowning the reply Andrew had begun to make. He waited for it to subside, and I heard the crowd behind us begin to quiet, waiting for him to speak. He looked over at Marius and me, standing imprisoned by the soldiers. Andrew opened his mouth. 

And then his head listed back as his knees gave way.


	3. Chapter 3

I was the first to react, pulling myself away from my captor in time to break the fall of Andrew's sagging body. The force of his collapse nearly pushed both of us back into the moat, but I ended up seated on the edge of the wharf with Andrew's head in my lap. 

I was so desperate in my search for signs of life in Andrew that I remained only dimly aware of the rising shouts of the crowd and the sharp orders of the lieutenant. Marius was struggling unsuccessfully to break free of his captors. The two men who had been holding Andrew rushed off to help keep the people back, while the sublieutenant was speaking rapidly to his lieutenant. I only became aware of my surroundings again when I heard the whisper of a sword being unsheathed and looked up to see the lieutenant walking toward us, his naked blade in hand. 

For a moment, I was tongue-tied. Then I said rapidly, in Koretian much worse than usual, "Wait! This man is Koretian. He is wearing a Daxion uniform only because he is a—" The words for spy or thief fled from my mind. "He works for the Jackal. He'll explain when he awakens." 

"What did she say?" asked the sublieutenant, confirming my fear that my rapid speech had been barely comprehensible. 

"Something about the man being Koretian," replied the lieutenant. "By the gods of day and night, that's all I need now." He looked over his shoulder as the soldiers behind him took a couple of steps back under the press of the anxious crowd. 

"What does it matter if he's a native of Koretia?" asked the sublieutenant. "He's a turncoat if he's wearing a Daxion uniform. We won't get into any trouble for killing him, but we'll be up on charges before the subcommander's court if we disobey his orders to kill any Daxions who make it this far." 

The lieutenant stared down at us, chewing his bottom lip. He was young, perhaps twenty years of age. I tried to think of words that would further help our cause. At that moment, a movement to the left of me attracted my attention. 

On the narrow edge between the hut and the moat, a shadowed figure, as slight in frame as a boy, stood watching us. His left palm was pressed against the timber wall of the hut, and his body was half turned away from the scene, perhaps because that was the only way in which he could stand in the narrow gap that he had somehow squeezed onto. As I saw him, my heart sprung in its cage like a lamb leaping in the springtime. Turning my head back toward the lieutenant, I cried with relief, "There! He'll explain. He'll tell you it's true." 

The lieutenant had been looking uneasily back at the crowd. At my words, he slowly looked in the direction indicated by my outstretched arm. He said, "Who?" 

As I looked back, my heart jolted again, this time sluggishly and painfully, as though my life's blood was already being drained from me. Perry was gone. Only the faintest of movements at the far end of the hut told me that I had not spun this tale out of my own hopes. I stared in disbelief, certain that he would return at any moment; then I heard the renewed sound of the crowd, and the lieutenant saying, "Very well. Get the woman out of the way; we'll take her prisoner." 

I felt the sublieutenant tugging at my shoulder, trying to pull me up, but I did not see him, for I was bent over Andrew, trying to shield him from the blade I could see close by. Near us, Marius had exploded into a stream of Daxion curses, and I could hear the sound of shuffling footsteps as his captors struggled to keep hold of him. Then his voice was smothered by two sounds that followed rapidly upon one another: the rumble of thunder above us and the bellow of a man's voice. 

I looked up in time to see the lieutenant jump as he turned. Beside me, the sublieutenant mumbled, "We'll be in the court tomorrow for sure." Then he too fell silent as the crowd parted to let through the man who was continuing to roar at the soldiers before him. 

He was dressed, like the other soldiers, in a black tunic and leather armor, but over his shoulders was draped a cloak of pure white, except where it was smudged by dirt. He was in the midst of pulling off his helmet, which he thrust into the hands of one of the soldiers with such violence that the man nearly keeled over. There was no danger any longer of the crowd surging forward, for they, like the soldiers, had fallen silent upon the man's approach. I could not catch exactly what the man was saying, but from the looks of shock on the soldiers' faces, I took it that I was being given a particularly thorough introduction to Koretian curses. 

The lieutenant tried several times to interrupt. Finally he took advantage of the man drawing breath. The lieutenant said quickly, "Sir, we had some trouble with the crowd, but I assure you, I was just about to follow your orders and kill these soldiers." 

"I see." The subcommander of the Koretian army folded his arms, causing his muscles to swell in a pronounced fashion. He stared at the lieutenant through icy eyes. "And that, I take it, is the explanation you planned to give me for killing Lord Andrew." 

The lieutenant was as motionless as a fallen body for a moment. Then he swung around to look down at the body lying in my arms. I was thus witness to the moment when horror entered his face. 

He said in a strangled voice, "Sir, I didn't know— I'd only met him once— He didn't say—" 

He was gesturing so wildly with his sword that the crowd began to murmur anxiously once more. The subcommander glanced at the people and then roared at the lieutenant, "Enough! Come over here and give me your report." 

His expression trapped in despair, the lieutenant followed the subcommander as the latter man strode over toward the tower. The sublieutenant, after a moment's hesitation, followed behind. As he did so, a flicker of motion caught my eye; it was Marius breaking free of his captors, who made no attempt to catch hold of him. Without hesitation, Marius came over and dropped to one knee beside me, and then placed his fingers against Andrew's wrist. After a moment he said, "His heart-pulse is steady; I think he just fainted. What's happening?" 

Quickly, I recounted to him the order of events. As I repeated the subcommander's words, Marius started and took another look down at Andrew, but before he could make any comment, he looked up again at someone who had just knelt on the other side of Andrew's body. 

It was Perry. He was staring at Andrew, and he was slowly reaching out toward him. 

"Don't touch him!" 

The words I spoke in Daxion came automatically. Perry was on the point of touching Andrew's hand. At my shout, he jerked back his hand and stared uncertainly at me. At his look of innocent surprise, I felt all the accumulated anger of that day boil over in me. Perry's flight at the border, his treatment of the beggar-boy, his odd behavior at the subcommander's house, his abandonment of Andrew to his doom – it all scalded my spirit. I heard myself say, "How _dare_ you touch him after he was almost killed because of you. You, who called yourself his friend, couldn't speak the words which even his enemy might have spoken out of pity. You're the worst friend that any man could have – and by the Spirit's breath, if I ever see the Jackal again, I'll tell him what sort of coward he was fool enough to take into his service." 

Perry continued to stare at me as though he had not comprehended what I had said. His lips were parted slightly, and his one eye was open wide. I expected him to reply, but he said nothing, and I felt my scalding anger subside into an unpleasant stew of guilt and fear and pain. "Oh, go away," I said wearily. "Nobody needs you here. Go away and stay away." 

I turned immediately to look back at Andrew, so I did not see Perry leave. Andrew's eyes were still closed, but I could feel his body begin to tremble. "We must get him warm," said Marius. "That water from the moat will chill him into a fever. Can you explain that to the soldiers?" 

I raised my head to speak to the two soldiers who were still hovering uneasily by us, but at that moment, the subcommander stepped toward us; he was unclasping his cloak as he came. The lieutenant was over by the crowd, talking to the people. Whatever he said seemed to reassure them, for the men and women were beginning to disperse. 

Kneeling down where Perry had been a moment before, the subcommander placed his cloak atop Andrew, saying to me in Koretian, "You're Princess Serva?" 

I nodded mutely. The subcommander's hands were occupied in tucking the edges of the cloak around Andrew's body. The subcommander gestured with his head and said, "What about this man?" 

I looked over at Marius. He did not know what the subcommander had said, but he had caught the gesture, and his expression had gone suddenly still. I said, "He's a Daxion soldier, but he saved us from the fire." 

The subcommander glanced over at Marius, waiting in a rigid pose. Then he shouted over his shoulder, "Lieutenant!" 

"Sir?" The lieutenant was by his side immediately. He kept folding his hands on top of each other, over and over, like a powerless eunuch wringing his hands. 

"Lieutenant, I am going to allow you an opportunity to redeem yourself," announced the subcommander. "I want you to escort this man to the border and hand him over to the Daxions. It's a dangerous mission, and you'll be lucky if you aren't drilled full of holes by the Daxion archers. If you succeed, I will forget that this incident ever took place. But if I find that you have failed in your mission – if you allow the man to come to harm or are foolish enough to abandon him – then I will hand you over to the Jackal and tell him what you almost did to Lord Andrew." 

The lieutenant's throat-ball bounced up and down several times before he said faintly, "I'll return him safely to his army, sir. You may be sure of that." He walked over to Marius and began pulling him up. 

Marius did not resist, but I saw his expression as he rose. I said rapidly in Daxion, "It's all right. He's taking you back to Daxis. He's under orders to keep you from harm." 

Marius glanced doubtfully at the subcommander, who gave him a quick grin before turning his attention back to Andrew. Slowly, Marius's lips rose in a smile as he looked at me, and he placed his hand to his heart and his forehead. After a moment, I remembered where I was and what I was. 

And so, for the first time in my life, I gave the free-man's greeting. 

"Brendon . . ." 

The voice was so soft that Marius could not have heard it as he was escorted away, but I immediately looked down and saw that Andrew was staring at the subcommander through half-opened eyes. The subcommander leaned over, saying, "I'm here, Andrew. How do you feel?" 

There was a pause. Andrew's trembling had ceased, but his breathing was beginning to grow heavy again. Finally he said in a low voice, "My head hurts a bit." 

"By the Jackal's claws!" exclaimed Subcommander Brendon. "Andrew, if you're admitting to pain, then you must be at the gateposts to the Land Beyond." 

Andrew made no reply; his eyelids had slid shut once more. I felt the soft pressure of a raindrop on my arm. Brendon said, "Curse it, we must get him out of the open before the rain starts. We'll never reach the palace before that happens." 

"There's the guard-hut right over there, sir," volunteered the sublieutenant, who was standing nearby. "It has a bed in it." 

"Go make sure the hearth-fire's lit," the subcommander ordered. The sublieutenant began running toward the hut immediately, as though he had a vanguard at his heels. Brendon leaned over again and said, "Andrew. Can you walk?" 

Andrew's eyes remained closed, but after a moment he said in a voice just above a whisper, "I'd rather not." 

"Stay still, then." The subcommander stooped over and gathered Andrew and the covering cloak into his arms. As he raised Andrew off the ground, a sharp cry escaped Andrew's lips. It was cut off almost immediately as Andrew turned his head slowly to press his face against Brendon's chest. 

I followed behind as the subcommander walked toward the hut, uncertain of my welcome but determined not to let Andrew out of my sight. Andrew lay limply in the subcommander's arms with his eyes closed, saying nothing, though once, when Brendon shifted his grip, I saw Andrew bite his lip. 

Soon we reached the guard-hut. Brendon slammed the door open with his foot and strode over to the bed opposite. Then, with surprising gentleness, he laid Andrew carefully down. 

I knelt beside the bed. The sublieutenant, nowhere to be seen, had succeeded in lighting the fire in the central hearth; light skipped on and off Andrew's face as though he were passing rapidly through a thousand days and nights. Beside me, Brendon was talking to a soldier who had followed us in. I heard the subcommander utter several more picturesque curses before coming to lean over the bed. "I need to go take care of something, Andrew," he said. "I'll be back soon." 

Andrew made no reply. His chest was heaving up and down like a slow, heavy tide; other than that, he was motionless. The subcommander turned to me and said, "Would you like to come back with me? I can find someone to take you into the palace." 

I scarcely looked his way; if he had ordered me to leave the hut, I doubt that I would have complied. As it was, I simply shook my head. I was vaguely aware of his retreating footsteps and the sound of the hut door closing. 

Andrew was beginning to shiver again, despite Brendon's cloak. I pulled up a blanket from the bottom of the bed and started to place it over him, but as I pulled it up to the top of his legs, his hand caught hold of my wrist. 

"What is it?" I said, leaning over. 

In a voice faint but even in tone, Andrew said, "Talk to me, please. I need to put my mind to something." 

I was silent a moment and then asked, "Are you really a lord?" 

Andrew let go of my wrist, and I slipped my hand into his. As I did so, he said, "It's just a title. I'm not a council lord." 

"What are you, then?" 

"At the moment, one of the Jackal's thieves." 

I hesitated, looking down at his unreadable face, empty even of any sign of pain. Afraid to press him any further, I said, "I met the Jackal." 

"Yes, John told me that he had talked with you." 

"John?" 

"That's the Jackal's human name. He wasn't born a god-man; he accepted the god's powers later in life." 

"But Perry said that John was—" 

I stopped. Through the walls of the hut I could hear the muffled sound of water splashing in the moat, men and women talking excitedly, and, further away, the sound of fire slowly dying away. But it was with no sense of surprise that I heard thunder suddenly rumble above us and swallow all other sounds. 

I whispered, "You're the Jackal's blood brother." 

Andrew's faint smile rose suddenly to the surface, though his eyes remained closed. "I enjoyed listening to your description of me when I was in the King's dungeon. As you can see, though, the tales about me are much exaggerated." 

"Are they?" I murmured. 

Whatever I had planned to say after that was cut off as Andrew abruptly gripped my hand like a vise, his fingernails cutting into me. He released me almost immediately, but I must have let out a gasp, for he said, "I'm sorry. Did I hurt you?" 

"Did _you_ hurt _me_?" Even in the dim light I could easily make out the caking blood on his head, the wounds on his chest, the black burn on his forearm, and the drops of cold moat-water that still encased him. Unable to think of what to say, I placed my arm around him and buried my face in his shoulder. 

A small sound made me look up finally. Brendon was standing in the open doorway, watching me. His expression, in the moment before he rid himself of it, was one of clear pity. I felt myself grow warm as I heard once more the voice of the Prince's friend Derek: "They say that all the women of Emor and Koretia grovel at his feet, though of course they have no hope of interesting him . . ." 

No doubt Brendon had witnessed this type of scene many times before and knew the eventual outcome. I thought to myself that Andrew had shown great kindness in answering my foolish, impulsive kiss with a sign of friendship. If he survived all this, I would not make matters worse for him by ever referring to what had happened. 

Another thunderbolt lit the sky, revealing that it was drizzling outside. Still cloakless, Brendon was plastered with water. He closed the door and came over to sit on the floor by Andrew. I hastily drew away to give him room. 

"I'm sorry about that," he said to Andrew. "A messenger arrived from the vanguard with a message from the Jackal. John says – I quote him exactly – 'I'll take care of Andrew when I get back. Just make sure that he's warm and dry.'" 

For the first time I heard Andrew laugh. It was a very quiet sound, like a brook bubbling. With his eyes still closed, he asked, "And when did he send this message?" 

"About the time you fell into the moat, I calculate. By the Jackal's eyes, why can't John ever give us more than a moment's notice when disaster strikes?" 

"Because he doesn't have more notice than that himself. Shouldn't you be with the army?" 

"What need? The Jackal left me here to protect the city against the Daxions, and practically every Daxion who attacked the city was killed in the fire. I've never waged a more effective campaign; I'm wondering how I can take credit for this and receive an elevation in pay. Unfortunately, that would require me to claim the god's powers, since thunderbolts are sent by the gods." 

In the pause that followed, I heard the increasingly heavy sound of water rushing down from the sky. The sound of fire in the city had diminished to a whisper. Andrew opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Brendon. "Is that how the fire began?" 

"Well, the Daxions didn't start it; they would hardly have set a fire-trap like that for themselves. And I know that none of my men did it. You heard the Jackal give his annual speech last winter about why he outlawed the use of fire in warfare. It made my blood run cold, to listen to his description of what he would do to anyone who broke that law. I'd swear that not a soldier in my army was prepared to defy the Jackal. So it seems that it really is the god's fire this time round – though why the Jackal would want to burn his own city is beyond me. I'll have more than one question for him when he returns." 

The subcommander put his hand up against his forehead to push back the hair that had plastered itself against his forehead like a vine against a wall. A bit of water trickled down and became trapped in his beard; the hearth-flames reflected upon the droplets so that they appeared like fire-sparks against the dark background of his beard. "Andrew," he said, "what happened at the border? I saw the Jackal's expression when he came back, and it was enough to keep me from questioning him beyond what he told us. But if anything happened that is likely to affect this war, I need to know." 

Andrew stared at him unblinking for a moment; then his eyelids drifted down, and he turned his head back so that it was facing the ceiling. Brendon said, "I'm a fool. I shouldn't be asking you this now." 

"No, if I don't tell you now, I'll never have the nerve to do so. And it does affect the war; it's probably the reason why the Daxions chose this moment to attack." 

I asked, "How did the Jackal even guess that you were alive?" 

I spoke with some hesitation, uncertain whether I should join into a conversation between men of such rank, but Brendon merely laughed. "Andrew's wound. I'm willing to gamble that's the reason. John survived a similar wound during this city's first fire thirty years ago. I now put forward as a general law the statement that Koretians never die of head wounds." 

"I think that John knew anyway," said Andrew, "but yes, I was as lucky as he was. I was unconscious for some time. When I awoke, Subcaptain Derek was trying to decide whether to question me on the spot or take me back to the palace. He finally decided to question me right away." 

Brendon's eyes scanned Andrew's body rapidly. He asked quietly, "Did he do so for long?" 

"Obviously not, or I wouldn't be in the relatively good state of health you see me in. The Jackal interrupted before he had proceeded far." 

Brendon gave a quick, tuneless whistle. "Very well, I can envision the rest. How many men, and how long did it take John to get one of their swords?" 

"It was a full unit. And he didn't use a blade." 

A thunderbolt sent light darting in through the cracks in the wall, making Brendon's face look white as a bone. He said in a shaky voice, "By the Jackal's claws, Andrew . . ." 

"I know. I didn't see much of it; I closed my eyes. I was terrified that he would forget who I was and use his claws against me as well. But when he spoke my name afterwards and I opened my eyes, he looked quite normal – except that he was covered in their blood." 

Brendon let out his breath in a long shudder. "Andrew, remind me never to raise my blade against you." 

"He didn't do it because of me, Brendon. Why should he? The subcaptain won against me in a fair duel; we were evenly matched in swordplay, and Derek had the added motive of wishing to avenge his lieutenant, whom I'd killed that night. No, that's what I want to understand: why the Jackal has gone on the hunt against the Daxions, spilling blood and kindling fire." 

My breath travelled swiftly in, and Andrew opened his eyes to look at me. Brendon asked, "What is it?" 

"Something the Jackal said, just before he went over the border." I repeated the words I had tried to erase from my mind: "'When the god's servant is harmed, the god alone must bring vengeance. I am on the hunt, and I will not rest until I have drunk the blood of my enemies and consumed their bodies with fire. This is to fulfill the promise that I made to my people long ago: for those who love me I bring peace without bounds, but for those who have broken my law, and repent not of their evil ways, there can be no peace.'" 

"'The god's servant,'" said Brendon reflectively. "Andrew, that sounds as though the Jackal was talking about you. Who else could it be?" 

Andrew continued to look at me. "This is the same subcaptain?" he said. 

I nodded; then, to satisfy Brendon's curious look, I said, "He killed the King's Bard." 

Brendon frowned. "So he killed a bard. Is that important?" 

"Rosetta was the _King's Bard_ ," I said. So casual had been Brendon's conduct toward me that I momentarily forgot I was arguing with one of the highest ranked men in Koretia. "She was the Voice of the Spirit, just as the King is. And— I remember now. It was after I told the Jackal of Rosetta's murder that he said this." 

"That settles it," said Brendon flatly, who showed no sign of being irritated at my boldness. "At least I know now why this city lies in ashes, though it's of cold comfort." 

"But I don't understand," I said. "Why would a Koretian god avenge the murder of a Daxion bard? And why would he destroy his own people's city in doing so?" 

For the first time since his arrival in the hut, Andrew moved his arm. He reached out to touch the brooch at my throat. "John is voice to the Jackal God, but the Jackal God is one of the faces of the Unknowable God, who is the god over all lands. On rare occasions, John speaks for the Unknowable God himself – this sounds like one such occasion. As to why the god brought his wrath down upon the innocent as well as the guilty . . . If I knew that, I would be wiser than any man alive. Even John can't explain why the god allows the innocent to suffer. All he can say is that we all bear the guilt for the evil done by our fellow men, just as we all receive the benefit of their good deeds. He says that's why it is not enough simply to do good ourselves. We must constantly be trying to help others in their struggles to remain faithful to the gods. In a case like this, where one man orders the death of the god's servant, it sets off a chain of events that ends in war and fire. And it may be that there are other reasons why the fire occurred, reasons only the god knows." 

"Let's just hope that the god has satisfied his bloodthirst tonight," Brendon said grimly. "I do not want to meet the Jackal after this battle and find him wearing the face of the god. I have enough trouble coping with stubborn, war-mongering Daxions, without having to calm down an angry god as well. —Yes, what is it?" 

Looking over my shoulder, I saw that the sublieutenant was standing at the doorway. Behind him, the last of the god's fire was dying under the rain. "Sir, another message has arrived from the Jackal," the sublieutenant said. 

"A spoken message, I take it, or you'd be handing me the letter," Brendon said impatiently. "Well, out with it, man. What does the Jackal say?" 

The sublieutenant looked over at Andrew uncertainly, and then back at his subcommander, who was now tapping his fingers against his sword sheath. When the sublieutenant finally spoke, though, his gaze rested on me. 

"The Jackal says that the King of Daxis is dead."


	4. Chapter 4

"Don't try to chase me out of here," said Brendon the following evening to Andrew. "Believe me, I have the welfare of Koretia well in mind. It is my opinion that I am doing more good in tending the sickbed of the Koretian Ambassador – who is the only man likely to bring permanent peace between Koretia and Daxis – than I am in going out on the field to hunt down the few remaining Daxion troops who didn't flee back over the border the moment that they heard of their commander's death." 

The Jackal's subcommander glanced my way as he spoke his final words. I looked back at him impassively. I had spent most of the day within the palace guest chamber where Brendon had brought me the night before, waiting for the tears to come, but nothing had happened. Some part of me refused to weep for the man who had tried to force me into a marriage with my hated cousin, who had ordered the death of his Bard, and who had started the chain of events that had nearly ended in both my death and Andrew's. 

Brendon had finally fetched me out of my chamber. Making no reference to my quietness, he had brought me to this gathering. 

Andrew was lying on the bed in one of the other guest chambers, his hand bandaged from a wound he had received while rescuing me. He was well enough now to lie on his side, but he had made no attempt to rise when Brendon brought me to his room; that was testimony enough to his condition. He did not look my way as he asked, "Has any more news arrived about how he died?" 

"Just what we know before, that he died of a sword wound in the back during battle – and that is peculiar enough in itself. When was the last time that the King fought alongside his own vanguard? The Jackal has always been the only ruler in the Three Lands who does more than supervise attacks from a safe distance. I didn't think that Leofwin had the skills to fight in a real battle." 

"I suppose that the Prince had need of as much help as he could find. Perhaps he persuaded the King to lead the initial attack," said Hollis. He was sitting on the floor next to Andrew's bed, sweeping the dust balls idly with his wide-brimmed hat. I had not received a formal introduction to the lean man who had an unremarkable face and pleasant manners, but from his clothes and from his references to pig styes, I took him to be one of the local farmers. He was also, it appeared, some sort of army official, for it seemed that he had helped Brendon organize the defense of the Koretian capital. When I first entered the room, he had been in the process of wiping dried blood off his sword with a rag that he afterwards carefully tucked under his belt. 

I could see that Andrew was now watching me, but I avoided his eye, pretending to concentrate on brushing dust off the brooch that the Jackal had sent me years ago – a brooch hand-carved by the Koretian ruler himself, I had come to learn from a chance remark made by Brendon. Yet my thoughts were not on Koretia's ruler, but on Daxis's former ruler. 

I had no wish to share my thoughts with anyone, even if Andrew could guess the implication behind Hollis's remark. For Andrew could not know what I knew: what event it was that might have caused the Prince to choose this moment to place my father in a conveniently dangerous battle position. 

"That isn't the story the Prince gives," said Brendon. It was clear from the way he phrased his statement that he at least understood what Richard had to gain from my father's death. "He claims that the King believed that the Jackal's dastardly blood brother had somehow kidnapped the Princess and forced her over the border. He claims that this, along with a certain incident along the border that was bloody enough to unnerve even the Prince, was what caused the King to take part in the attack himself. I suppose that the Prince neglected to mention to the King any other reasons the Princess might have had for fleeing Daxis." 

"I've never understood why the commanders of the other two of the Three Lands don't take any real part in battle," said Hollis, reaching over to pour a cup of wine from a pitcher Brendon had brought to the chamber. "It can't be due to cowardice; certainly Leofwin was no coward." 

"The other lands consider the commander too valuable to lose in battle," Brendon suggested, casting a longing look at the wine. 

"There's more to it than that, I think," said Andrew. "In the case of the Chara, the Emorians may want to maintain his mystique by keeping him distinct from the other army officials. It's a miracle that they allow him to appear on battlefields at all, considering that the Chara is bound by Emorian law to remain within the palace grounds during peacetime. In the case of the Daxions – thank you, Hollis – I imagine that their tradition is influenced by the fact that the army commander is sometimes a queen, and it's unlikely that a woman would take part in battle." 

I opened my mouth to say that a few queens over the centuries had taken part in wars, but Brendon cut me off, saying, "That's wall-vine wine that Hollis just handed you, Andrew. The doctors requisitioned all of our wild-berry wine for the wounded soldiers." 

Andrew had been raising to his lips the cup that Hollis had handed him. Without pause he leaned over and handed the wine to Brendon. 

"You lived in Emor for fifteen years, you go back there periodically as the Jackal's Ambassador – why won't you drink Emorian wine?" Brendon asked crossly. 

"Because I'm not the perfect ambassador everyone believes me to be," replied Andrew calmly. "Remind me to tell you some time how much I hate Emorian winters." 

"You hate Koretian summers too." Hollis was trying, without much success, to remove a piece of encrusted mud from his tunic with his blade, and so he missed seeing Andrew's cool gaze as it came to rest on him. "I heard the Jackal say once that, when you came back to Koretia, he thought you had become completely Emorian until he overheard the Emorians saying how Koretian you were." 

"I belong to no land," said Andrew. "You know that as well as the Jackal." 

There was no sharpness to his tone, but his voice, with its strangely abridged vowels, was so soft that Hollis instantly looked up. His eyes danced slightly, searching Andrew's face. He said, "Or you belong to all of the Unknowable God's land. That is another way of putting it." 

Andrew had been resting on his elbow. Now he placed his cheek back down on the head-cushion and extended one scarred finger out to touch lightly the top of the wine pitcher. His face was as rigid as one of the god-masks I had seen in practically every room of the palace which I had entered. The relaxed face he had shown in my father's dungeon had disappeared, and I was beginning to sense that I had taken it too much for granted. Even here, amongst men who were evidently his longtime friends, Andrew was unwilling to show as many of his private thoughts as he had shown to me, a stranger. Perhaps only his impending death had caused him to be so candid with me, and perhaps he would be unwilling to share anything further with me. For now he had new reasons to avoid being intimate with me. 

At the moment that I thought this, Andrew's eyes raised from the pitcher to look straight into mine, and I realized that I had been staring at him for some time. I quickly dropped my gaze, feeling my face grow warm. As though nothing had happened, he said, "That's how John describes it, I know – but the god's land is a vast place. Those barbarian nations up on the mainland go on further than I could explore in a hundred lifetimes. Though I'm glad to have had the opportunity to visit them and the Three Lands of the Great Peninsula, there are times when I'd like simply to pause in one spot and rest." 

"If you don't pause, Andrew, it's your own fault," said Brendon. He was leaning against an open doorway that led onto a balcony. "I admire industry as much as the next man, but look at the life you lead. First you spend half the winter spying in central Koretia – and don't tell me that John sent you on that mission, because I know that he was too busy worrying about the fighting in Emor to assign new tasks to any of his thieves at that time. Then spring arrives, and you go off to Emor on an ambassadorial mission. You're no sooner back from that than you dash off to Daxis for more spy work. I suppose that the minute the Jackal allows you to leave your bed, you'll be begging him to send you somewhere else. What is it that you're searching for so desperately that you can't find here in the city of your birth?" 

Andrew looked steadily at Brendon and made no reply. After a while the subcommander dropped his gaze and said with a sigh, "I should know better than to ask you a direct question. I suppose that the Jackal knows the answer, and he's better qualified to help you than I am. You ought to spend more time here, if not for your own sake, then for John's. He needs you." 

"He has Perry." 

I felt an unpleasant jolt in my stomach, but nobody was looking my way, so I remained silent. Hollis said, "That may be why the Jackal needs you. He's worried about Perry." 

The touch of an emotion entered into Andrew's eyes then. He said, "Is something wrong with Perry?" 

"You would know that better than I do; he was with you last winter. All I know is that he came back from that mission very subdued. He wouldn't even talk to the Jackal about it, so you know that it must be a serious problem. What went on between the two of you? He wasn't fighting you again, was he?" 

Andrew shook his head and reached over for the cup of water that Hollis had poured him after he refused the wine. "Far from it. We worked together very well." He rubbed the moist rim of the cup for a moment before saying, "He asked me at the end of the trip whether I thought he would ever make a good spy. I had to tell him no." 

There was a long silence before Hollis said hesitantly, "His memory is of some use, isn't it?" 

"It's of great use; I told him that too. But even his perfect memory can't make up for his lack of other skills that a spy needs." Andrew paused to sip from the cup before adding, "I couldn't make Perry see how his very existence makes him of value to the Jackal. All he could see was that yet again he had failed at something that John had asked him to do. He knows as well as I do that John didn't ask him to take up espionage because he was in need of another spy, but I think Perry remains eager to find some sort of work he can do that will be truly useful. Just being Perry isn't enough for him." 

"It ought to be." Brendon's voice was gruff, and I cast a startled look at him. The battle-hardened subcommander seemed to be struggling to retain some strong emotion. "By the Jackal's eyes, just being Perry and doing what he does would have been enough to break me or any other man. How can he think so little of himself?" 

"He has always been like that." Hollis's voice was quiet. "Leaving aside my family, Perry has been the most valuable jewel in my life from the moment I met him – yet he has always acted as though I did him a great and undeserved favor by becoming his friend. It is as though he is blind to the fact that all of us would happily lay down our lives for him if need be." 

"He hasn't had the opportunity to return such a favor," said Andrew. "That's the problem." 

Andrew's blunt words caused Hollis and Brendon to exchange glances. They appeared as mystified by Andrew's remark as I was by the entire conversation. I was beginning to wonder whether I ought to speak, if only to satisfy my curiosity, when Hollis said, "By the way, where have you hidden Perry today, Brendon? I'd assumed that he was with the Jackal, but I hear that our weary commander took to his bed at dawn and hasn't left his sleeping chamber since then." 

Brendon had swung away from the doorpost at Hollis's first words, alarm written on his face. He said slowly, "I thought he was with you. Didn't the Jackal place him under your care last night?" 

"Yes, and you see how successful I was at obeying the Jackal's command. The moment that the fire began and we started to worry that Andrew and the Princess were caught in it, Perry slipped away from me. I heard that he was with you later." 

Brendon shook his head. "Only long enough to warn me about what was happening to Andrew and Serva beside the moat. He followed me back to the moat, but I lost sight of him after that. I thought that—" 

"I told him to go away." 

My voice came out flatter than I'd intended. I was trying to hide the fact that I felt guilty for not speaking up before this. Hollis's hand tightened on his hat. Brendon turned toward me, gaping, and said, "You did _what_?" 

"I told him to go away and stay away." Then, as his expression turned to incredulity, I added hastily, "I don't suppose he told you what happened before he saw you. I saw him at the wharf, and I told the lieutenant that Perry could vouch for the fact that Andrew was Koretian – and Perry simply ran away. I didn't know then that he ran to fetch you, but even so, he should have stayed. Andrew could have been killed in the time it took for you to arrive. So when I looked up afterwards and saw Perry, just about to touch Andrew, for all the world as though he were a savior rather than the coward he'd shown himself to be, I lost my temper." 

Brendon opened his mouth and closed it several times without speaking. Hollis had now crumpled his hat into a ball. It was left to Andrew to ask quietly, with his voice even tighter than usual, "Serva, this is important. What exactly did you say to Perry?" 

I hesitated, seeing the concentrated stares of the men around me; then I repeated my words, feeling more and more foolish as I realized how unkind I had been to Perry. 

Even so, I was not prepared for the reaction I received upon finishing my report. Brendon swore in a strangled voice, "May the Jackal eat his dead," and then hurried forward to join Hollis, who had risen from his place. The farmer was struggling to hold back Andrew, who had stood up and was trying to reach the corridor door. 

"By the gods of day and night!" cried Brendon, endeavoring to press Andrew back. "That's all that John needs now, to have _you_ wandering around wounded as well. Have sense, man!" 

"Andrew, we'll find him," Hollis said with soft intensity. "You know that we will. Don't make matters worse for the Jackal than they already are." 

Andrew stopped struggling and looked at Hollis. Hollis continued in a low voice, "I found him the last time this happened, and I can find him again. Trust me, as the Jackal trusted me." 

After a moment, Andrew nodded. Hollis released him, and then stepped forward quickly to catch Andrew as he began to collapse. Brendon was already at the doorway, saying, "I'll send out my men to search the palace grounds. They have little to do as it is." 

Andrew's eyes were closed. Hollis, after easing the Jackal's blood brother onto the bed, began to walk away without a word. As he reached the door, Andrew said, his eyes still closed, "Tell John. He's the only one who will be able to help Perry now." 

Hollis nodded. His gaze drifted over my way, and for a moment I was frozen under the spell of his cold eyes, before the farmer disappeared. 

I went over to kneel beside Andrew's bed. He opened his eyes a crack but said nothing. 

"Andrew, I'm sorry." I succeeded in keeping my voice level only by avoiding the knowledge in my mind that I had evidently committed a great gaffe. "I didn't mean to offend Perry so much that he'd act this way. I just couldn't understand why he didn't speak up when he had the chance." 

Andrew's voice was barely above a whisper as he said, "It's not that easy for Perry." 

"Look," I said firmly, "I can see for myself that Perry is shy, but how hard can it be for him to say a few words when a man's life is in danger? I took a great liking to Perry when I first met him, but I can't help but be angry when I see someone acting in such a cowardly manner." 

Andrew's gaze rested on me so steadily that I began to feel uneasy, as though I were being placed under judgment in my father's court. After a minute, Andrew said, "Could I have some of that wine after all?" 

I hurriedly poured him a cup. He propped himself up on one elbow, took a sip from it, and then rapidly lowered himself onto the cushion once more. I took the cup back from him before he had spilled more than a few drops. Andrew was silent a while more, looking at me. Then he said in a voice that sounded oddly gentle, "I don't suppose that, when Perry first spoke to you, it meant any more to you than it meant to me when Perry first spoke to me. I took it so much for granted that I'd forgotten about him within a few minutes. But when Perry was twelve, and John met him for the first time, Perry had not spoken to anyone for five years." 

The day was quite hot, not only because of the late-spring sun but also because of the fires still smoldering in the city; yet I felt a chill enter my body. Somehow I knew, upon hearing this single sentence, that Andrew's judgment of me had been right, and that the words which would follow would show only too clearly how great the crime had been that I had just committed. 

I whispered, "Why?" 

Andrew drew up his left arm so that it rested under his head. On the underside I could still see the bandaged burn he had received the night before. "It was due to the fire – the first fire, when the Emorians destroyed this city. I was in that fire, as I once told you, and I thought that what I saw was terrible, but it was far worse for Perry. I won't tell you all that happened; it is Perry's story to tell. But this much everyone knows: he belonged to a large family, and he witnessed them all die before his eyes. And of course you've seen what the fire did to his face and hand." 

A horrible thought entered my mind. I said, "If he remembers that—" 

"Yes, he remembers it; he remembers it as vividly as he remembers anything that has happened since then. With me and everyone else who underwent that fire, time has dulled our experience of what happened – but not with Perry. It's as though it happened to him today. He remembers the fire, and everything afterwards, and nothing before." 

_"Nothing?"_

"Nothing except his own name. He woke up after the fire with no memory and no voice and—" 

"May the Spirit have mercy on him," I whispered. 

"I'm not finished. No memory and no voice, and when anyone touches him, he feels as though he is being touched by fire." 

I stared blindly at Andrew, seeing in my mind's eye the image of Perry jerking back from my touch – and then a second, horribly comprehensible image of Perry reaching out to touch Andrew in the moment before I shouted at him. I buried my face in my arms, closing my eyes. 

Andrew's voice continued on, as impassively as my father's voice when he was pronouncing sentence. "After the fire, Perry was passed from household to household for several years. He spent all of his days huddled in corners, resented by the families he stayed with. He never left the houses; he was terrified of sunlight, terrified of people, terrified of everything in life. Then he had the misfortune to fall into the hands of an Emorian who lived up to the Emorians' reputation in discipline and abused Perry to such an extent that he ended up running away. Of course, he had nowhere to go but the streets." 

I kept my eyes closed, trying to shut away the image that entered my mind of Perry staring down at the beggar-boy. Andrew said, "John isn't sure how Perry managed to survive during those months. He says that the gods must have been watching over Perry. The first time that I talked for long to Perry, he was in the Jackal's dungeon, trying to pet a vicious rat. He told me later that he always felt kinship with the rats because he used to spend so much time alongside them on the garbage heaps, trying to find scraps of food." 

A sound escaped my throat, but if Andrew heard me, he took no notice. Instead, he continued by saying, "Perry tried to beg too, but he could only do so at night, and he couldn't ask for money or even look at the people passing by, so you can imagine how much money he made. That's how John first met him, and by a miracle, John managed to persuade Perry to come back with him to the priests' house outside this city. That's where John grew up, because he was an orphan like Perry." 

"And he persuaded Perry to talk?" My mouth was muffled against the skin of my arm, which was beginning to turn salty wet. 

"If you spend much time here in the palace, you'll find that John's methods of persuasion are unlike anyone else's. That was true even before he took on the god's powers. What John did was that he took Perry to his room; then he sat silently beside him. John was working as a trader then, but for a month he didn't leave Perry's side except to go to morning and evening worship. He simply sat there, praying silently for Perry, day after day. And at the end of the month, Perry spoke for the first time since the fire." 

I raised my head, barely seeing Andrew through the image of the Koretian ruler kneeling beside Perry two nights before, silently waiting for him to speak, and looking down upon him with an expression of quiet expectation. I said, "And then?" 

"And then John slowly began offering Perry the opportunity to stretch his unbearably narrow limits to something that might come somewhere near normality. He introduced Perry to his friends; he asked Perry on occasion to try new things. And after twenty-five years, this is what Perry can do: He can speak to half a dozen people – you're the sixth person – but only if he is alone with them, and only if they speak to him first. He will on rare occasions allow himself to be touched and on even rarer occasions will touch someone, much as you or I might reach out and place our hands in a fire. With great difficulty, he can go alone onto the streets and can even do so in daytime, though that takes tremendous effort on his part. He can stay in a room with strangers – for Perry, a stranger is anyone he can't speak to – as long as he has a friend beside him, and as long as the strangers do not stare too long at his face. 

"It took him years to learn how to do all this, and it requires more courage on his part to do any one of these things than it took you and me to cross over the border. Yet Perry remains convinced that he is a coward, convinced that he is a burden to John and all of his other friends, because he is not, and never will be, a normal man." 

It took me a long while after Andrew had finished telling his story to find the strength to speak. Andrew waited all the while with his blank expression that told nothing about what he was thinking. Finally I asked, "Will he be all right now?" 

Andrew sighed and reached for the cup to fiddle with it. I realized with relief that this was a sign he had relaxed out of his rigidness. "I don't know," he said quietly. "If you hadn't said what you did about the Jackal . . . The central fact you need to understand about Perry is that he has fought all these battles for the sake of pleasing John. If John were to disappear tomorrow, I don't know what would happen to Perry. As it is, if Perry thinks he has lost John's love . . ." 

During the silence that followed, I took the cup from Andrew's hand and sipped from it. When I raised my eyes again, I saw that Andrew's eyes were fixed upon me, but whatever thought was in his mind remained unspoken, for his eyes drifted past me to the doorway where Hollis was standing. 

"I found him," the farmer said. "He had enough sense to run to the Jackal's sleeping chamber. The Jackal must have found him there when he arrived back at dawn. At any rate, the Jackal hasn't left his quarters since then." 

"Perry hasn't spoken?" Andrew said. 

Hollis shook his head. He was a bit older than the others, but he had a sprightliness which suggested he would be plowing his fields for many years ahead. "I assume not. The Jackal has evidently taken a vow of silence again, for he wouldn't speak to me when I came to the door of his quarters. I told him what had happened, though, and I asked him whether he wanted me to bring the Princess there. He nodded yes." 

I rose to my feet. My legs were heavy under me from their long rest. My face must have revealed what I was feeling, for Hollis, without any harshness to his expression, put his hand behind my back to guide me toward the door. When I looked back, I saw that Andrew was watching us leave.


	5. Chapter 5

We walked quickly through the corridors, which were broad and marble-stoned, but which were strangely dark because they were lit by no windows. Torches cast a soft glow of smoky light on the finely carved doorways through which men and women were busily passing. I expected at some point to reach a heavily guarded staircase or doorway that would be the entrance to the royal residence. But all that happened was that we passed under a low arch guarded by a single soldier who casually nodded his greeting to Hollis. 

After that, the surroundings changed. We were now walking through a narrow corridor built of dark wood that glowed golden under the sun streaming through the broad windows along one side of it. The doorways here were small and rudely built, with no decorative carving to enliven the lintels and posts. We met fewer people in this corridor, and very soon we were alone in a passage that grew more and more cramped, as though it were a stream narrowing as it grew more distant from the sea. 

The corridor ended in a single door with no mark on it to indicate what lay behind it. Hollis stopped as we neared it and said to me in a low voice, "I'll leave you to go the rest of the way yourself. When I came knocking at the Jackal's quarters before, Perry looked as though he would gladly have turned himself into a burrowing worm so as to avoid my presence. I think that it would be best if you just walked in without knocking." 

I nodded. As I listened to Hollis's retreating footsteps, I tried to still my throbbing heart. I was remembering the Jackal, and how I had seen his beast-sharp teeth in the moment before he welcomed me to his land. If that was how the Jackal treated those who were welcome to his presence, how would he treat someone who had hurt his friend? My mind flashed with terrible images: the Jackal's fingers curling carefully inward to hide his claws, his body covered in other men's blood . . . Then I remembered Perry, and I forced myself to walk the remaining distance to the door. I opened it a crack. 

It opened into a space so small that my first thought was that I had walked through the wrong door. The chamber held barely enough space for a bed, a clothes trunk, a table, and a single chair. All of these were of the plainest design, and no decorations hung on the wall but for a single, face-sized mask with no markings on it. An open archway to the left led to another chamber, but I could see at a glance that this held little more than another unadorned bed. 

The room in which I stood was very dark, for the shutter to the broad window opposite had been drawn closed. To the right of this window, squeezed into the narrow confines of a corner as though he were being held there by a storm-wind, sat Perry. His arms squeezed his legs hard against his body, and his face was pressed against his knees. As I entered the room, his head jerked up, and I caught a brief glimpse of his only remaining eye, wide with whiteness, before he pushed his face down again. 

The ruler of Daxis was sitting in the opposite corner. Like Perry, his knees were drawn up against his body, but his arms were wrapped loosely around them, and his head was up. He was not looking at Perry; he appeared to be looking at nothing at all, but his eyes jiggled oddly, as though he were staring at a dancing fire. This much I saw before he turned his head and looked at me, then rose. 

It takes only a minute to scribe those words, but the deed took him quite a long time, so long that I was barely aware that he was moving until he had finally stood up. Then he walked toward me, his feet making no sound on the floorboards that were curling with age. I felt my heart begin to batter against my body again, seeking an escape. It was all that I could do to remain where I was as the Koretian god approached me. 

I had been too frightened until now to look directly at his face, but as he reached my side and put out his hand to touch me, I raised my eyes in order to meet his. His eyes, black as a starless night, drew me out of my fear and grief momentarily, so that for an instant I forgot who I was and why I was here. Then the touch of his hand, warm and very human, brought me back to myself. And yet I felt as though I had returned to a different place than that which I had left, for the fear and grief seemed odd to me now as I stood within the spell of the Jackal's peaceful eyes. 

His face held no anger, and his hand warmed me like the glow of an evening fire. He stood a moment looking at me – not so much looking at me, as giving me some silent gift – and then he stepped silently past me into the corridor, closing the door behind him. And I was left alone with Perry, who remained enwrapped in his misery. 

I stood by the door, waiting for Perry to look up. After a while, I realized that I could wait until all the bards of Daxis sang in one chorus before this would happen. I took one tentative step forward, and the aging board under my foot cracked like a lash of lightning. Perry, who was already curled in tighter in a ball than seemed possible, pressed himself back against the corner as though he were mortar being placed in the cracks of a wall. 

I made my way slowly across the room, watching as each sound of my footstep reverberated through Perry's body. I sat down as close to Perry as I dared – an arm's length away from him – and then contemplated the huddled figure before me. 

The Jackal had tried, for a second time, to reach Perry through shared silence. So far, he had not succeeded, and I doubted that I could do better than he at that job. In any case, it does not come naturally to a Daxion to sit in silence. For a Daxion, any Daxion, there is only one way in which to heal pain. I opened my mouth and began to sing. 

The Tale of the Song Twins – that was what I sung. The Spirit must have bade me sing this, for I had opened my mouth intending to sing some short healing song. Instead, as Perry's head jerked up at my opening words, and as he stared at me with his eye wide with terror, I began softly to tell the story of the only mute Daxion who is celebrated in song. 

She was born, the song said, amidst the breath of the Spirit and was found abandoned in one half of a basket that was floating on the unsteady ground of the marsh. Her foster parents cared for her kindly, even when it became clear that she would never be able to sing her service to the Spirit. As she grew older and realized how she was different from other children, she began to grieve, especially as she found herself inventing beautiful songs she could not put to tongue. But her mother, who was a wise woman, noticed her daughter's sorrow and chided her for it. "There are many others in the world who have troubles worse than your own," the mother said. "Though you cannot speak or sing, you still can serve the Spirit in your own way. Seek out those who are less fortunate than yourself and help them in any way you can. Your deeds will be your service to the Spirit." 

And so the mute young woman followed her mother's advice, wandering through the marshland of the southwest, stopping at the isolated villages there and offering her service wherever it was needed. And there came a time when she had travelled so far that she came to a village that no one had visited for a thousand years. So long had these villagers been isolated from other Daxions that they did not even know the Song Spirit. 

(Here I paused to take breath, for at this point in the tale, the music always stopped, to signify the horror of a place with no songs. Perry was still watching me with his one eye wide, but now he nudged himself slightly forward out of the corner, and then stopped and waited silently. I realized that this was his way of showing that he was eager to hear the rest of the story, so I began singing again.) 

Although the villagers did not know the Song Spirit, they were kind and gentle people, and they welcomed the woman into their midst. For her part, though she joined in the village activities and helped the other women with their weaving and fishing and house-care, she grieved that she could not bring to the villagers the blessings of the Spirit. The villagers, she knew, were capable of singing; she had heard them hum tunelessly on occasion. All that they needed to know were melodies and words – but she could not bring them any songs. 

Then one day she noticed a young man about her own age. His face looked oddly familiar, though she did not think she had seen him before, and his voice, as he hummed, was as rich as a song-bird's. Seeing her stare at the boy, one of the villagers said, "Yes, he is an odd one. We found him when he was just a baby, floating in the marsh in half of a basket. He loves his life here, but he has always been unhappy, though he cannot say why." 

The young woman's heart beat hard in her throat as she understood why it was that the young man looked so familiar. She came over to the young man, and as he sighted her, he recognized their kinship and reached out his hand to her. At the moment that their hands touched, the woman felt the songs trapped within herself pour forth, and the man, without knowing why, felt the songs enter him. He began to sing. And so the woman was rejoined with her Song Twin, and the blessings of the Spirit were brought to the village. 

(I paused again, expecting this time that Perry would think that the song had ended, for this is what I had thought the first time I heard this tale. But Perry, with greater intuition than I had shown as a child, edged himself minutely forward, and I rewarded him by giving him the Sacrifice Segment of the tale.) 

For many months more, the woman and her Song Twin continued to live in the village, teaching the villagers the songs that they knew. For the young man, this was the end of the story, for he had all the happiness he needed in being able to sing to the people he loved. But one night, while he was sleeping, the Song Spirit came to him and chided him, as a mother scolds her child. "When you and your sister were in the womb," the Spirit told him, "there was only room enough for my voice in one of you. And so I gave your sister my songs, and you became my voice. Now she has come to you and given you all that she has, and you are blessed with my songs as well as my voice. But have you not noticed, amidst your joy, how sad she has become? She wished to spend her life travelling through the marshland, helping others, but now she does not feel that she can leave you." 

The young man recognized the truth of the Spirit's words, and he cried bitterly, recognizing the sacrifice that the Spirit was asking him to make. But he loved both the Spirit and his sister, and so the next day he told his Song Twin that he wished to leave the village where he had grown up and go with her on her travels. And so they departed from the village hand in hand, and forever after they travelled together, joined in the Spirit by her songs. 

Here the song ended. Still seated, Perry slowly lowered his bent legs until he was sitting cross-legged. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out, and his brow furrowed as he scanned my face, looking for something. 

I could not know at the time what prompted me to do what I did next. I knew from Andrew's words what Perry's limitations were; I could guess from what Andrew had said what the worst thing was that I could do. But it was as though something moved within me. I raised my hand and touched Perry lightly on the shoulder, saying, "Sing." 

Perry's breath rushed into his open mouth, but he did not jerk back from my touch. His eye opened even wider than before, staring at some impossibility. I did not wait to see whether he would react to my action with renewed fear. Instead, I began singing the Tale of the Song Twin again. This time, after a very few notes, Perry joined in. 

I had intended to continue singing alongside him, for this is a song of friendship, and so it is often sung together by friends. But it did not take my voice long to falter and fall silent. Like the woman in the song, I found that my heart was beating hard, and like her, I was rendered mute. For the voice I heard in the tiny, dark confines of the Jackal's chamber was that of a bard. 

There was no question about it; the youngest Daxion would have recognized it as such. There are bards such as Eulalee who have beautiful voices, and there are bards whose voices are less beautiful but who are skilled at conveying the Spirit's power. Perry had both gifts. His deep voice rang through the room like the tone from a perfectly cast bell, and he framed the words with a passion and fervency that fit them like an carefully tailored tunic. By the time he began to voice the woman's longing to speak her songs, tears were streaking down my face, but Perry did not notice. He was staring down at the floor, absorbed in his service to the Spirit, having apparently forgotten my presence at all. The words I had sung only once poured forth from him flawlessly, transformed by his voice into something new. 

Time passed; I barely noticed it. We had reached the point where the woman saw her Song Twin for the first time. Suddenly Perry stopped and raised his head. His mouth shaped a single word soundlessly, and I felt my heart begin to beat faster once more. 

Then I realized that Perry was not looking at me. I turned my head. 

The Jackal was standing in the open doorway. His head was bowed under the low lintel of the door; to my surprise, I saw that his eyes were cast down as well, as though he were a slave in the presence of his master. Then his gaze slowly rose. It lingered on me for a moment, sending some wordless message I could not interpret, and then travelled past me to the man sitting behind me. 

The Jackal said softly, "That was more beautiful than anything I have ever before heard." 

I looked back at Perry. He was biting his lip and looking down at the floor again, but a smile shimmered on his face. I got up as quietly as I could and began to walk toward the door. Halfway there, I was intercepted by the Jackal, who said in a low voice, "Come back in an hour's time. He'll want to learn more of the Spirit's songs." 

His touch was as gentle as before, and his voice caught slightly as he spoke, as though he had been overly moved by the music. I nodded and walked to the door, but as I was turning to close the door behind me, something made me pause and look closer at the scene I was leaving behind. 

The Jackal had taken my spot on the floor next to Perry, and he had just reached out his right hand to place it above Perry's fire-scarred hand. It hovered over Perry like a bird over the ground. As I watched, Perry began telling in soft, broken sentences what had happened at the moat. 

The Jackal was very still and said nothing. His hand was motionless, though it must have been hard for him to hold it in the air in that manner. Although I could see only his back, there came to me the image Andrew had given me, of a young man sacrificing his voice so that a beggar-boy might have the chance to speak. 

Thus I realized who Perry's Song Twin was. 

I felt an odd hollowness inside me, as though I had just lost something I had not even known I wanted. I quickly shut the door and left the two men alone together.


	6. Chapter 6

"So you're the one who taught Perry to sing!" 

I leaned against the doorway to the chamber, wondering how to answer the palpable delight of the woman sitting before me. I was unprepared for her appearance. These were the pre-dawn hours, when I expected most of the palace to be asleep. I too ought to have been asleep, having stayed up past midnight teaching Perry songs. I had only left him after he indicated that he wanted to practice what he had learned – though I think he had simply reached the point where his happiness was too great to bear in the presence of another person. It was a shocking transformation, one that appeared not to surprise the Jackal when he made occasional, silent visits to his living quarters. But the thought of that transformation had kept me awake in bed afterwards, wondering at the healing powers of the Spirit. 

Finally dismissing sleep as a futile goal, I had wandered the palace aimlessly until I happened upon Subcommander Brendon's palace quarters. There I found Andrew lying on a reclining couch, with his head in the lap of a woman. 

I could not think of what to reply to her remark, so I gave her my best smile – it is a smile all slaves learn who wish to survive long with their masters – and took in her appearance. She spoke Koretian as a native does, but she appeared from her pale skin to have some Emorian blood in her. She wore an elegantly laced noblewoman's gown, bright as an emerald. She was about thirty years of age, and her face was cheerful and beautiful. 

This, then, was the reason for Andrew's restraint with me in the Daxion palace grounds. Deciding that I needed to put greater effort into hiding what I was feeling, I said, "I am pleased to meet you, madam." 

Andrew was watching me with such concentration that I sensed my performance had not passed muster with him. I supposed that he too had learned that smile when he was a slave. He said in a matter-of-fact manner, "I didn't have a chance to finish my introductions. This is my sister Ursula." 

"Oh!" I said. Not thinking of how revealing this would be, I added with sincerity, "I am very pleased to meet you." 

A dimple appeared in Ursula's cheek, but she apparently shared her brother's tact. "Do come in and sit down; I've been longing to meet you," she said. "How in the names of all the gods did you persuade Perry to sing? He has always hated music." 

I walked toward a chair next to the couch, my mind racing back to snatch up belated knowledge. Of course Andrew had a sister; the Prince had said so during that long-ago conversation I had eavesdropped upon. This was Lady Ursula, who had been married to the Chara Peter before his death. I was not sure how to address the Consort to a Chara, particularly as I had not yet ascertained what my rank was in this land. Andrew had suddenly switched to calling me by my name, but this might only have been a sign of friendliness rather than an indication that he no longer considered me a princess. The other Koretians I had met had an irritating habit of introducing themselves without indicating their rank or how they wished me to address them. In desperation, I had fallen back on my old habit of pretending I was a princess but being prepared to act like a servant at a moment's notice. 

"Why did Perry hate music?" I asked, avoiding the whole question of rank by addressing my question to Andrew. 

"It's his first memory," said Andrew succinctly. "He remembers being sung to sleep by his mother on the night of the fire." 

"One of _my_ first memories is of Perry screaming when I sang," said Ursula. "That was the night when John and Perry first met Brendon— Oh, we were just talking about you." 

I looked toward the door where Brendon, grim-faced, was standing with a crying baby in his arms. He strode over to the couch and deposited the baby into Ursula's arms, saying, "Take your son." 

"Why is he always _my_ son when he's wet or cranky?" asked Ursula, smiling up at the subcommander. "I'm sorry, Andrew, do you mind if I move? —You're back early." 

"I'm early because I had to break off a war council to return a baby to his mother." Brendon was red in the face and so intent on delivering his message that neither he nor Ursula noticed Andrew wincing as Ursula slid out of her seat. 

A moment later, there was nothing to notice. Andrew lay with his head on a cushion, his face scarcely moving as he asked, "Did the Jackal decide whether to apply the peace oath to the Daxion soldiers remaining in Koretia?" 

"The Jackal wasn't at the meeting; he left the decision to me, and I decided not to apply the oath to them. _That_ much we were able to decide before I had to leave." Brendon glared at his wife. "A war council is no place for a baby. You ought not to have left him with me." 

Ursula had been cooing at her child as she rocked him. Now she looked up and said crossly, "I left him with you in the hope that he would remind you that other mothers have sons who are depending on your mercy." 

"By the Jackal's claws, Ursula, what has come over you?" Brendon was pacing up and down the length of the room, his cloak trailing behind him. He had evidently come from the field recently, for he was wearing his army uniform: leather chest armor and shin guards, an iron helmet, and a sword belt tightly slung around his tunic. All of this must have been a heavy costume for the warm late-spring night, for his face was turning steadily more red. "You never had this timidness about my killing when we were the Jackal's thieves." 

"I've had a child since then," said Ursula, raising her voice above the baby's continued cries. "It changes the way I look at things. I know what I would feel if some day I sent my son to war and knew that the subcommander of the opposing army was going to hunt down without mercy the poor soldiers who couldn't make it back across the border in time." 

"Ursula, we are at war!" Brendon's voice was so loud that I looked uneasily over at Andrew, but he was watching the argument with a serene expression in his eyes which suggested that he had witnessed this scene many times before. "The Prince is watching for any sign of weakness in us. It is weakness not to kill the enemy when he lingers in your land, hoping to cause additional harm." 

"That is a man's argument," said Ursula, her frustration equally divided between her husband and the baby who was not responding to her cradling arms. "It is men who think that peace can be achieved by killing and maiming just in order to demonstrate pompously how strong they are. If this war were run by women, we would lay down our arms and talk through our differences." 

"Lay down our arms two days after the Daxions tried to capture our city?" shouted Brendon. "Are you mad? We can't afford to show mercy toward the Daxions. The only way to bring peace is to defeat our enemy." 

"Oh, you sound just like Peter." 

In the interval that followed, the only sound was that of the strong-lunged baby's wails. Ursula's anger had drained from her face. She was biting her lip and had her head bowed over the baby. Brendon was staring at her with an open mouth. He began to reply but was cut off by a word: "Wait." 

Andrew had propped himself onto one elbow. All the ease was gone from his eyes. Brendon and Ursula looked over at him with movements so quick as to be eager. There was a pause before Andrew said softly, "Brendon, you've never known what it is like to have to sit to the side and watch while others do the sort of things that you'd be doing if you were able. Ursula was a thief, and now she can't do that type of work any longer, because she must spend her days nursing your child. Advising you is the only way she can participate in the war, and because she stays at home while you travel with the army, she knows certain things that you don't. You should listen to her." 

Brendon replied with a grunt, but this was followed by a grin at Ursula. She smiled back, and then said to Andrew, "Don't leave me out. What am I failing to see?" 

"That Brendon has to care for his army as a mother cares for her child," said Andrew, still quiet. "Vengeance is the other side to mercy; I heard Lord Carle say that one time, and it's true. I don't know whether Brendon is right about this, but I know that he's making his decision, not out of pomposity, but in order to protect his men." 

" _And_ protect babies like this one," said Brendon firmly. "I have them in mind as well." 

"I suppose I don't have enough experience with this," said Ursula, smiling at Brendon with evident chagrin. "Until this year, I've never had to protect anyone younger than myself – except Perry, of course." 

Andrew had lain back on the couch, closing his eyes; Brendon and Ursula were exchanging amiable looks; so I was the only one who saw Perry standing at the doorway. I had no chance to witness his reaction to this strange statement by the younger woman, for upon seeing us in conversation, he dipped his eyes and began to turn away. I said quickly, "Have you come to sing for us?" 

He turned as though pulled unwillingly by a line cast by my words. Ursula, who had performed a quick transformation during that time from embarrassment to merriment, said, "I know why he has come. He is here to sing a nursery song to his namesake." 

Perry came forward, shutting the door carefully behind him, and stood an arm's length from Ursula. Looking down at the baby in its swaddling cloths, he reached out a hand and let it hover over the child's head, but did not touch it. 

"Perry-John doesn't live up to the model of either of the men for whom he was named," said Brendon dryly. "He is not at all quiet. Can't you find a way of keeping his mouth otherwise occupied?" 

Ursula immediately began unfastening the hooks at the front of her gown, saying, "Can you sing us a song, Perry? John said that you have a wonderful voice." She shifted the baby in her arms so as to lay it against her breast. The baby's cries ceased abruptly as it began to suckle. 

I looked over at Perry, the only man in the room not kin to Ursula, but he seemed neither disturbed nor overly interested by this display. "What sort of song would you like to hear?" he asked softly. 

"A war song," said Brendon, glaring with mock ferocity at his wife. 

Ursula laughed. "A war song indeed, so that Brendon will be inspired to go off and bravely fight our enemy." 

"Or bravely direct the fighting from the safety of this palace," said Brendon, seating himself atop the table where Ursula was already leaning. "This war is so disconcertingly short that I'm already at the stage of sending out my captains to do the last bits of cleaning up. The Prince, who is as efficient at retreating as he is at attacking, has indicated that he will send his suggestions for a peace settlement by the end of the week, and I will need to be here to receive that. How about a song that is about both war and peace?" 

Perry looked my way. I was about to offer a suggestion when I caught myself in time and said, "Ask the Song Spirit. She tells her bards what to sing." 

A smile trembled at the threshold to Perry's face; then it took courage and entered his expression. Brendon helped Ursula to slide up onto the table beside him as Perry began to sing the Song of the Blind and Deaf. 

This is an odd song whose meaning had eluded me until my father explained to me one day that the tale had probably been composed many centuries before, when Arpesh was a sovereign land, not yet a dominion of Emor, and had pursued its war against Emor so far south that its army reached Daxis. Since the Arpeshians are as well known for their crafts as the Daxions are for their music, the song tells of how the people of the two lands must have regarded each other when they had their first encounter. 

There was a northern army, sang Perry, which could see but could not hear, and it attacked a southern army which could hear but not see. Soon both sides were eager for peace, but when the northern army sent its green branch in token of peace, the southern army could not see it; and when the southern army sang its peace oath, the northern army could not hear it; and so the two sides continued to fight. The war might have lasted forever except that a child was born who could both see and hear, and through him peace was found. 

Perry was still singing the dark passage about the battles when his head, which he usually kept bowed when he sang, tilted slightly upward to see how his audience was receiving his song. I followed his gaze and started with shock. Andrew looked as I would have expected him to: he was listening with great concentration, his eyes suitably sobered by the bleak phrases Perry was singing forth with such power. But the two Koretians behind him were following the song in a very different manner. Ursula was smiling broadly – as though Perry were singing a light comedy rather than describing the terrible destruction of war – and Brendon was clearly fidgeting. 

Perry's voice stopped mid-sentence with a choke. I looked back at him and saw that he had taken a step backwards; there was panic in his eyes. Ursula slid off of the table and said, "Don't stop! I loved what you were singing – it was so pretty." 

I saw her words land like a blow on Perry. I could have cursed Ursula, but when I turned her way again, I saw her staring at Perry with innocent bewilderment. My gaze drifted down toward Andrew, who was once again propped up on his elbow and whose eyes were even more somber than they had been when Perry had sung the terrible words that Ursula had described as "pretty." He, at least, knew how Perry had been unwittingly attacked. 

"I can't," Perry whispered. "I'm sorry, but I can't sing to you any more." 

He turned away. Clutching tightly her baby, which had long since finished feeding and was now sleeping, Ursula hurried after Perry. I saw him stop in the corridor and wait for her. He didn't say anything in reply to her soft words of entreaty, but when she asked to come with him, he nodded, and the two of them left together. 

Brendon blew forth a sigh. "It's my fault," he said. "I don't have any ear for music." 

"Few Koretians do," said Andrew. "Perry may have a hard time finding an appropriate audience in this land." He began to lower himself back down onto the couch. This time, even Brendon noticed when Andrew winced. 

"Is that head wound of yours any better?" asked Brendon. 

"Much better," Andrew replied. There was a pause, which Brendon refused to break; then Andrew added, "It's not so much my head as my back." A faint smile flickered over his face. "The subcaptain seems to have liked working with men's backs. He put mine all out of joint." 

Brendon unclasped his cloak, tossed it aside, and peeled off the leather gloves of his uniform. "Take off your tunic," he instructed. "I'll give your back a massage." 

Andrew's eyes drifted with apparent aimlessness over to me. I rose quickly and said, "I should leave anyway." 

Andrew spent a moment assessing me before he said, "There's no need. —Could you lend me a hand, Brendon?" 

I had intended to stare fixedly at the shields and swords lining the walls of the room; most appeared to be of Koretian design, but a few were unmistakably from Marcadia, that dominion which has perfected the art of war and whose armaments, crafted by the neighboring Arpeshians, are the most beautiful in the Three Lands. However, I could not keep myself from looking over to see how Andrew was managing the painful task of sitting upright to pull off his tunic. Once there, my gaze was arrested by sight of Andrew's body. 

Since it had already turned summer-warm, Andrew was not wearing any breeches; once stripped of his tunic and undertunic, he was left only with his breechcloth, and I could see clearly on his torso and thighs the scars of old blade cuts. The lines made channels on skin that was honey-colored rather than darker brown; like me, Andrew appeared to have spent much of his life out of the strong sun that shines upon Daxis and Koretia. 

His skin was so beautiful – glimmering in the light as though he were a statue – that it took me a moment to realize there was something odd about his torso. I would have sworn, from the slimness of his arms and legs, that Andrew was a slender man, yet his hips had as much padding on them as a woman's might have. His loose-fitting tunic had disguised this from me until now, but I realized that, had I seen him stripped on our first meeting, I would have considered his body as different from other men's bodies as his clipped voice was. His looks set him apart from other men. 

I realized suddenly that my gaze was lingering a good deal too long on Andrew's body, and so I began my concentrated inspection of the armaments around me. With my mind still dutifully on thoughts of the various instruments that men had created to maim each other with, I finally turned my attention back to Andrew, now lying on his stomach while Brendon kneaded his back. Thus distracted, I was not prepared to hide my response to what I saw. 

I saw Andrew watching me and knew that he had heard my gasp. Since it was obviously too late to pretend that I was not shocked, I asked, "Did the subcaptain do that to you?" 

"No," said Andrew quietly. "These are old." 

I stepped forward tentatively. Now that I was closer I could see that the scars across his back were indeed white with age, and they stretched as though Andrew's body had grown since the time they were inflicted. The scars ran in overlapping lines so that his back had the appearance of a field that has been furrowed by a plow. In all my years in the slave-quarters, watching Toft do his work on disobedient slaves, I had never seen anything like it. 

Swallowing the sickness in my throat, I said, "No wonder the King's Torturer didn't bother to beat you. He wouldn't have been able to find an untouched area to begin on." 

Andrew's light smile flickered once more. "Yes, he was impressed by what he saw. He asked me how it happened, and I told him, and that was what made him decide not to try his own skills on me. When I left him, he was debating with himself whether to move to Emor and learn from the real masters of his art." 

Brendon muttered something deep in his throat, but he did not pause in his massage. I asked, "So how did it happen?" 

After a pause, Andrew responded, "When the Emorians destroyed this city thirty years ago, I was captured and sold to the Chara's palace. I tried to run away from my first slave-master there, and he did this to me." A long pause followed before he added, "He wanted me to apologize and say that I would behave in a civilized Emorian fashion. I couldn't do that." 

"Civilized!" Brendon roared. "Those god-profaning, blood-drinking, child-mangling—" I ceased to follow what he was saying since I had not yet learned that many curses in Koretian. 

Andrew waited until he was finished before saying mildly, "You know as well as I do that the Emorians have two sides to them. In any case, my life became easier after I began serving the Chara." 

Brendon dug his fingers deep into Andrew's mauled flesh. "Emorians are Emorians. I don't like to say anything against Peter – he was your friend, and he's with the gods now – but I used to receive letters from Ursula that chilled me. It wasn't that he intended to be cruel to her. He simply had that Emorian obsession with obedience and discipline above all else. You can't blame Ursula for hating her life in Emor." 

"I don't," said Andrew, still mildly. "Brendon, would you mind not treating my back as though it were one of your battlefields?" 

Brendon raised his hands at once. "I should know better than to try to doctor you when I'm angry. In any case, I have another meeting with my captains at dawn; I need to rest before then. Perhaps Serva could take over here." 

Andrew was wearing one of his unreadable expressions that prevented me from seeing what he thought of this suggestion. I volunteered, in what I hoped was a cool and disinterested manner, "I used to help the Daxion army doctors with their work. I learned to do massages from them." 

"Splendid!" said Brendon. "I will leave you in good hands, then, Andrew. Just remember to stay off your feet for the next couple of days. You have the Jackal's orders on that." 

"And we all know what an obedient servant I am," said Andrew without smiling at whatever joke he was making. His gaze travelled back toward me as Brendon left the room. I waited, but he offer no indication whether he wished me to proceed, so I went over to his side and began to work my hands down the lacerated back. 

To cover the awkwardness of the situation, I said, "I thought what you said to Ursula before was interesting. You seem to have a good understanding of women's minds." 

There was no reply. I looked down at Andrew's face. He had his head placed upon his bandaged hand, and his eyes were closed. He must only have been concentrating on what I was doing to his back, however, because after a while he said, "I became acquainted with a fair number of the slave-women in the Chara's palace. Many domestic disputes took place in the slave-quarters; I expect that it was the same in your father's palace. I used to be sickened by the way people would fight and fight and never pay attention to what the other person was saying. Considering what we were all undergoing, it seemed absurd for us to have these pointless arguments. Half the time, the problems would have been solved if the people involved had just tried to see matters through the other person's eyes." 

"And did you attempt to help them do that, as you did with Ursula and Brendon?" I ran my fingers along the knobby sides of Andrew's spine, trying hard not to catch my nails on the upraised flesh beside it. 

Andrew shook his head. "That's not the best way to do it. I wouldn't have lectured Brendon and Ursula like that if I had been well enough to think clearly. Peace lasts longer if you bring the fighting parties to the point where they can speak to each other and get to know each other's thoughts directly. That way, the Unknowable God becomes the only ambassador. My job is simply to encourage enemies to take the god's peace oath toward each other, and to keep them from breaking that oath." 

He shifted slightly under my hands. I could feel some of the knots of his muscles begin to relax. "I didn't involve myself in such matters when I was a slave; I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. Then I was sold by my first master and began serving the Chara's son, and soon after that, the Chara Peter gained his throne and inherited his father's slaves. He gave me my freedom. I hadn't expected that; I had thought that I would be a slave for the rest of my life. Freedom was such a wonderful gift that I felt I must repay it in some way. I had nothing I could give to the Chara, but I knew that he hated the servants' disputes as much as I did. So I began to mediate, both for the slave-servants and for the other free-servants. I tried to prevent as many wars as I could." 

"It's like what Ursula said about laying down your arms and talking." I reached the small of Andrew's back and paused, leaving my hands where they were. "You seem to have mastered the women's art of settling disputes." 

I was caught up in my thoughts, wondering whether there was any safe manner in which I could suggest to Andrew that he remove his breechcloth so that I could reach the bottom of his back. And so I only became aware that his muscles had tightened once more when he said, with his vowels suddenly much shorter than before, "Did you mention that you worked with the Daxion army doctors?" 

"Yes," I said, quickly removing my hands from his back. Perhaps my lingering touch had been what bothered Andrew. "My father let me do it. He always liked seeing me try out new things." 

"The doctors here are in great need of aid. If you went down to the dungeon now, where the hospital is located, I'm sure they could find work for you." 

I looked at Andrew's face, but his eyes were still closed. Maybe he just wanted to sleep. I took up Brendon's cloak, which he had left behind, and placed it over Andrew, saying, "I'll come by and see you later." 

Andrew made no reply. I decided he must already have fallen asleep.


	7. Chapter 7

When I arrived at the dungeon, I found that most of the wounded had been placed in a large cell intended to hold many prisoners. I paused at the doorway, gazing upon the men, some groaning, some weeping, some talking softly to friends and kinfolk who were by their side. Amidst them all, I could sight only one doctor. He was bowed over a patient, listening to something the man was saying. The doctor's hair was wet with sweat. It was chilly in the dungeon, despite the small fires lit throughout the cell, so I guessed that this doctor must have been at work for many hours. 

The patient stopped speaking; he was having a hard time managing the words through his pain. The doctor said something to him that did not carry to where I stood. Whatever he said caused the man to laugh, and the patient's face was momentarily freed from its distress. The doctor laid a hand on him for a moment before passing on to a soldier nearby. As he did so, the doctor's face came into view. 

He did not notice me until I was standing beside him. He was absorbed in trying to cut a bandage with an iron dagger, which he was having some difficulty doing, as his left hand – evidently his dagger hand – appeared to be stiffened in some way. As he turned the palm my way, I saw that, like Perry's hand, the doctor's was wasted by fire. 

He looked up at me, and I asked, "May I do that for you—?" I stopped short of saying more, not sure what honorific was used to address a god. 

"Thank you," said the Jackal as he handed me his dagger. "For some reason, I can still fight with my left hand, but not cut bandages with it. What brings you here?" 

"Lord Andrew said that you needed help, Jackal." Just using his title seemed safest. "I used to assist some of the army doctors in Daxis." 

"Then you can help me bandage this man." The Jackal was talking over the soldier softly, as the man was asleep, though groaning. Seeing my look, the Jackal added, "We have run out of drugged wine and are having to treat the soldiers without it. Fortunately, most of the worst cases have already been taken care of." 

"Where did you learn to doctor, Jackal?" I asked, handing him another strip of bandaging. 

"Please call me John," he said, neatly bypassing the issue of honorifics, and also providing me with a sudden answer to my unvoiced question concerning my rank. "I trained to be a priest when I was young, and this was part of the training." He raised his head abruptly. After the briefest of pauses, a sharp cry broke through the groans around us. 

"The wine wore off too soon," said John. "Would you be kind enough to talk to that soldier while I finish here?" 

I slipped away from his side, stepping quickly through the rows of men lying on floor pallets. The men here were wearing Koretian uniforms stained with blood, but it appeared that most of them had already been treated and were simply waiting to see whether they lived or died. The soldier who was crying out was different. I could see no wound in him except for a small scar near his shoulder blade. He was tossing on his pallet, trying now to suppress his cries. As he sighted me, he bit his lip and managed to still himself except for his trembling. 

I took hold of his hand. "It's all right. How may I help you?" 

He looked at me with fear, which puzzled me until he said, "I thought I was in Koretia." 

"You are," I said, inwardly cursing my accent. "Where do you hurt?" 

I thought for a moment that he would be too stoic to answer, but he placed his hand up at the small wound and said, "Here. They took out the arrow yesterday, but it feels worse today." 

Still holding his hand, I reached up with my other hand and placed my fingers on the wound. The soldier flinched but did not try to escape my touch. 

John said over my shoulder, "What is it?" 

"A bit of arrow left inside," I murmured, and then watched as John touched the wound. The soldier had been gripping my hand hard all this time. Now, as John met his eyes, I felt his grip relax. 

"Are you the doctor?" asked the soldier. His face grew less contorted as he stared up at the gentle-eyed man above him. 

John nodded. "I am going to have to cut out the last part of that arrow," he said to the soldier. "But it is close to one of the vessels in your body that carries blood. I cannot be sure that you will survive the operation." 

The soldier bit his lip again, and for a moment he did nothing more than breathe heavily. Then his hand crept over to the wound, touching the dried blood there. John bent over the soldier further, and the man's bloody fingers reached up to touch John's forehead. 

"I absolve you of my death before the gods," the soldier whispered. 

"Thank you," said John. He looked my way, but I had already brought over a bowl of water that lay nearby and was cleaning the wound free of its black blood. A moan escaped the soldier as I touched him, and he closed his eyes. 

John asked, "Which god do you worship?" 

The soldier opened his eyes again. He replied, between deep breaths, "The Jackal." 

"Then place your trust in the god and offer up to him your sacrifice." 

The soldier appeared to understand these enigmatic words. He nodded, and his expression calmed. John placed his palm on the soldier's forehead and for a moment held it there. Something made me look up at John's face; his eyes were focussed on something other than the man before him. Then he said quietly, "Be free of your pain," and the soldier's eyes closed; he was asleep. 

John was already turning away to hold his dagger blade over a nearby fire. He kept it there for only a moment, jerking back the blade as though the hilt had turned hot in his hand. As he turned back, he caught sight of me watching him. 

"You have that power?" I said. Then I added, "I mean – you have the power to make him sleep, but not to heal him?" 

"The god limits my powers," replied John, his eyes now on the soldier's wound. "I can't do even that much unless the patient has great trust in his god." 

I said nothing more, for John was beginning to cut into the wound, and he was having to use his stiff left hand. He was a long time at the work. At one point I reached forward with a cloth to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He murmured his thanks but did not look my way again until he had safely removed the remaining bit of arrow. 

At the moment that this happened, the soldier groaned in his sleep for the first time, but his breathing remained shallow. It was John who took several heavy breaths before turning to wipe off his blade. 

I began bandaging the wound, saying, "You talk about the god as though he were separate from you." 

John smiled then. "People find it more reassuring when I do." 

"But you _are_ a god?" I said hesitantly, feeling that I should not find it so easy to speak with a divine being. 

"I am a god-man, which is more complicated. At times like now, the god's powers are buried deep within me, and I'm not fully aware of them. I can even disobey the god, paradoxical as that may seem. That is the human side to me." John finished washing his hands and settled down to watch me finish my bandaging. "At other times, I am one with the god, and his will is mine. It's hard to describe. Your father would have understood, as it was the same with him." 

I looked up, startled. "He was just an ordinary man." 

"He was the King of Daxis. All the rulers of the Three Lands wear the mask of the Unknowable God, though in different manners. Did you never sense the Song Spirit in his presence?" 

I thought then of the music that always preceded him. "Yes," I said. "But the Spirit is present in all Daxions, not just my father." 

"I used to be a trader." John folded the remaining bandages into neat piles as though they were documents. "I learned my profession before the god joined himself fully with me. In those years, there were times when I would make a bargain that was particularly tricky. Sometimes I would feel as though I was not the only one there negotiating the trade; something else was inside me, aiding me with my work. So yes, the god works through all men, Daxions and Koretians alike. But in certain cases, such as your father's and mine, the god opens the borders between himself and the man he has joined himself with. When that happens, I can call as fully upon his powers as is possible when the god wears a human body." 

As he finished speaking, two doctors walked into the room. They did not look our way except to make the free-man's greeting, which John returned. Thinking back on the casual manner in which Brendon had accepted my inclusion in the guard-hut conversation, I thought I could see why Andrew spoke so easily to prince and slave alike. Evidently the relationship between master and servant was very different in Koretia. 

John rose to his feet and began to wind his way over to a table at the side of the room. I stayed where I was, beside the sleeping soldier. When John returned, he was holding two mugs in his hand. 

"You may not care for this," he said. "They say that you must be raised on wild-berry wine in order to enjoy its taste." 

I took a sip and then forced myself to swallow the bitter liquid. John was watching me, so I drank again. The second cup was easier than the first. 

As though there had been no pause in our conversation, John said, "Some men have bound themselves quite strongly to the god's will, but they aren't aware of it. Andrew is one such man. It was through him that Koretia and Emor were brought to peace fifteen years ago; as a result, the Chara Peter freed this land. And when war threatened to break out five years ago, Andrew again served as an ambassador between the Chara Peter and me. At the moment he is in my service, but at other times I receive the god's commands through Andrew's words, though he rarely hears the god speaking inwardly to him. He is unlike any other man I know in the Three Lands." 

I was scarcely aware of the wine I was drinking now. I was too astonished to find that John had a look of puzzlement on his face, as though even the god-man had not been able to penetrate Andrew's mystery. I said, "Andrew told me, many years ago, that you knew each other when you were boys. Was he the same then as he is now?" 

"No." John was sitting cross-legged on the other side of the soldier we had treated. I could see only his black eyes as he lifted the mug up to drink. "Andrew was very different when he was young. He was full of unbounded passion and easy affection. He smiled and laughed a great deal, he was free with his thoughts, and he had the spirit of a wild hawk." 

"What happened?" I asked. 

"His wings were clipped." John looked down at the mug, avoiding my eyes for the first time. "He'll have told you by now that he was sent into slavery by the Emorians. When he finally returned here, he was a free-man again, but it was as though he was still bound by chains. He has never lost some of those chains." 

I set my empty mug down. "I find him odd. He can be gentle at times and violent at others. It is as though he is two people." 

"Well," said John with a slight smile, "that's an accusation I've had to endure as well. I bring my vengeance down upon my enemies, and then I come and do this sort of work." He waved his hand over the sleeping soldier. "Those are the two sides of the Unknowable God, and they're present in everyone. But what happened with Andrew, I think, is that he encountered pain so intense when he was a slave that he built barriers around each part of himself. His violence and his gentleness are separated in such a way that he can only show one or the other. There was a great risk when he was younger that he would turn his face from the god and dedicate himself to brutality. Instead, he has given over his will to the god, and now he uses each part of himself in the god's service, though the boundaries still remain." 

John hesitated before adding, "There are certain areas to Andrew which are bound so tightly that even I cannot break past them. I don't know whether Andrew will ever allow those areas to be freed. He endured so much in the hands of the Emorians; I can't blame him for wanting to keep those old wounds from aching once more. In some ways he is worse off than Perry, who has the desire to reach beyond his barriers, if not always the ability." 

John's words echoed in my head for a moment more. Then I raised my eyes. Standing in the doorway, as though he had been called, was the slight figure of Perry. 

He was eyeing the scene before him with a guarded look. A doctor passed near him, and he shied away, half turning to go. He stopped himself and turned back. 

John had already turned his head and seen him. By the time I reached the door, both men were standing in the empty corridor as John spoke quietly to Perry. 

As I walked up, John was saying, ". . . think that it will help him if you can do this. Daxions require music for their healing." 

Perry was standing with one foot behind him, as though ready to flee at any moment, but all that he said was, "I thought you didn't believe that I would ever be able to talk to strangers." 

"I said that you should not continue to force yourself to do so, since you had been struggling for years without success. But singing may be different from speaking. Will you try this?" 

Perry's gaze fell. At first I thought he was looking at the floor, but then I saw that his eyes were focussed on John's left hand, resting at that moment on his dagger. He said softly, "Show me where he is." 

The Jackal started forward, with Perry at his heels. I hesitated, but Perry had caught sight of me and was looking back at me with some anxiousness. I came over and began walking beside him, saying, "You're up early like me." 

"I couldn't sleep. John had asked me to come down here this morning to help him in some way. I thought that it would be better to get that task done and discarded." His eyes were on John, who was moving more quickly than us down the dungeon corridor. 

"I could sing to the Daxion instead of you," I suggested. 

"No, it has to be me. John says that—" He stopped, taking a deep breath. Ahead of us, John was unlocking a door. Without looking back at us, he stepped into the cell. Perry stared at the open door for a moment without moving; then he followed John into the room. 

John was already sitting on the floor next to a man dressed in the ragged remains of a grey uniform. The man was sitting up, and there appeared to be no wound on his body, but a bandage lay over the top part of the man's face. Peering out from under the edge of it was raw, disfigured skin that had been burnt away by fire. 

I looked over at Perry; his eyes were fixed on the man, and he was trembling. I remembered in time not to touch him. Instead I looked back at the soldier, who was breathing hard but saying in a defiant voice, "Look, Koretian, you cannot keep me here forever. Either kill me or release me, but do not act as though I am of any use to you as a prisoner." 

"It is all one whether we kill you or release you," said John with a hardness I had not heard from him before. "Either way you will get what you want." 

"That is between me and the Spirit," said the soldier. "If I prefer to sever my blood rather than continue my life like this, what is it to you?" 

"Just that I will not have my doctoring skills wasted. You are lucky to be alive." 

"Lucky?" The soldier gave a harsh laugh. "Oh, yes, I know there are other men burnt worse than me; you need not sing me your speech again. They have more courage for life than I do, that is all. You ought to be pleased to see that your enemy is made of such weak stuff." 

"I prefer an enemy who fights to the end," replied John. "It is not long ago that you and your fellow soldiers gave forth the Song of Battle. Have you forgotten its sound?" 

"What songs are there for me to hear in this land?" asked the soldier. "The Spirit has no dwelling place here. She is not here to tell me to hold back my hand, so I will do as seems best to me." 

"It is unwise to go against the gods' will." John's voice was suddenly soft, and I felt a pricking at the back of my neck. "You will need to answer to the Spirit's judgment if you take from her what is hers by right." 

The soldier was silent for a moment before saying, "You may know what your own gods want, Koretian, but say no more about what the Spirit desires. She is Daxis's goddess." 

"The gods and goddesses know each other's desires," said John, "and the Spirit has been known to visit this land. I have brought you one of our bards." 

I looked over at Perry then. I saw the moment when he flinched as the soldier began to laugh. The laugh only lasted a second. It was cut off abruptly; I turned to see that John was gripping the man's wrist tight. 

"Do not mock the goddess's servants," he said. This time there was no mistaking the power in his speech, though his voice remained quiet. "I am the Jackal, and I know my sister-god's voice when I hear it spoken through a bard. Listen, and you will hear it as well." 

The soldier had begun to breathe heavily again. After a while he said firmly, "I take no orders from a Koretian god. But if you wish, you may bid your bard sing. I will judge for myself whether the Spirit has spoken through him or her." 

"You must bid him yourself." 

"What folly is this? Bards receive their commands from the King or from the Spirit. It is not for men like me to tell them what to sing." 

"The Spirit will tell him what to sing, but he requires your help to begin. He is mute to strangers, and has been so since the fire destroyed his face when he was a child." 

The soldier had been leaning torpidly against the cell wall. Now he stiffened, clenching his fists. "You Koretians are full of deceptions," he said grimly, "but I am not vulnerable to such a trap. I told you before, it is of no matter to me whether there are other men who have chosen to live with what I have." 

"It may be of no matter to you, but it makes a difference to the Spirit," said John. "She chooses with care those whom she uses as vessels for her power. Will you bid him or no?" 

The soldier's frown lingered. Finally he cried, "Bard!" 

I looked at Perry again. His trembling had returned, but his chin was up and his eyes were even as they looked, not at the soldier, but at John. Then he looked my way. 

"Go," I said gently, wondering what dark battlefield I was urging him onto. He looked back at the soldier, swallowed, and walked swiftly forward to kneel by the man's side. John made way for him, coming to stand by me. 

Evidently hearing Perry's arrival, the soldier said, "Koretian bard, if you are truly a bard, I bid you sing as the Spirit wishes." 

I suppose the pause that followed was no more than a heartbeat. Perry was looking down at the soldier, and the soldier was blind, so only I saw the flash of worry that passed over John's face. Then it was gone, and in the next moment Perry raised his voice in song. 

I had been wondering all this while what Perry would sing. After the first time he sung to me, I had taught him some of the lighter songs of the spirit, believing that it would take time before he was ready to sing the somber songs that tear at one's soul. Which of these would Perry choose to sing to the wounded man before us? 

I had forgotten, for the moment, that it is the Spirit who chooses the song. 

The Song of the Bright Sun – that was the song that Perry poured forth. The lilting lyrics tell no story except that of how the sun rises each morning in Daxis, bringing the Spirit's gift to the people: light that shines on the Daxions, feeds their crops, and shows forth the splendor of land. And then, as the evening comes, the sun dips toward the horizon, its face changing blood-warm and – I caught my breath as I remembered this phrase – causing the sky to burn like fire. And through it all, the Spirit sings her love and her peace, as a mother sings her child to sleep. 

My eyes were so much on Perry, his face once more transformed by the singing, that it was not until the song was over that I saw that the soldier was shaking, weeping dryly from eyes that no longer held any tears. Released from the Spirit's service, Perry jerked back and cast a desperate look at John. Reading the signal he received there, he fled from the room. 

I lingered only long enough to see John come forward to the soldier's side once more; then I went out into the corridor. 

It took me some time to find Perry. He was pressed into a dark corner of the dungeon, his face against the wall. When he heard my step, he turned suddenly, terror on his face. Recognizing me, he steadied himself with an effort. 

I said, "I hadn't realized what that last part would mean to you when I taught you that song – the part about the mother singing her child to sleep." 

"It wasn't that," he whispered. "It's just hard being close to someone I don't know." 

He pushed his hands back against the wall, as though trying to disappear into the stones. I stepped back a few feet, saying, "John ought not to have asked you to do that." 

"I want him to," Perry replied swiftly. "I want him to give me hard things to do." 

"Why?" I asked. "The things you do already are hard enough for you." 

Perry's one eye narrowed as though he was not sure I would understand. "The gods of this land demand sacrifice." 

I said hesitantly, "But the Jackal wouldn't ask you to—" 

"No. But John made a sacrifice for me." Perry pushed himself away from the wall with his one good hand and came to stand by me. His voice was intent on communicating something important. "I am seventeen, and I have never allowed anyone to touch me, not even John. I have just been stabbed by an Emorian soldier, and still I won't let John touch me. I am going to die. And so he builds a fire, though he is as afraid of fire as I am, and he places his dagger hand in the fire as a sacrifice to the Sun God for my life. . . . I owe him my voice, and I owe him my life." He paused, and added, "If he asked me to walk through fire, I would do so. He is everything to me." 

It took me a moment to understand what Perry was saying, so oddly had he expressed it. Then I realized that what had happened to him at age seventeen was so vividly remembered that it was as though it was still happening to him. His voice held a passion that seemed to suggest fear, but of what I could not discern. He looked at me in a defiant manner that made me uneasy. Did he expect me to dispute what he said? So I simply asked, "Shall we go back upstairs?" 

Perry continued to look upon me darkly for another minute. Finally he turned without a word and headed into the opposite direction that I had originally come in. I hurried off to catch up with him. "Where are we going?" I asked. 

Perry pointed. Far up ahead, the black marble that extended even down into the dungeon was replaced by a luminous, gold-colored wall with one door in it. A couple of guards flanked the door, but they were chatting with each other in a leisurely manner that suggested they did not expect to be challenging many visitors. "That's the royal residence," Perry said. 

"It looks different from the rest of the palace." 

"It's the ancient Koretian Council Hall; the palace was built around it. Now it's used for the living quarters of the Jackal." Perry paused, and then added, "There isn't room for many others to live there, but John said that he wanted me with him, so we share his quarters. We—" 

His words cut off. We had reached within earshot of the guards.


	8. Chapter 8

"How many more can you teach me?" asked Perry a week later. 

I groaned and rolled over onto my back. We were in Perry's sleeping chamber, whose only entrance could be found within the Jackal's sleeping chamber; Perry rarely left their joint living quarters. All of my mornings now were spent teaching Perry the songs I knew. Each song he would listen to once, repeat perfectly, and then demand more. Song after song I taught him, until my head was whirling with tunes and words. 

In the face of Perry's voracious appetite for music, I had found it something of a relief to spend my afternoons accompanying John on his visits to the dispossessed city dwellers. The Koretians usually called the Jackal by the name of John the trader, his human identity. They treated him like a kinsman who has done well in life but who was, when all things were considered, still one of their own. Only an occasional hushed reference – such as to the manner in which the unarmed Jackal had once defended his life against an attempted assassin – revealed that the Koretians remained deeply aware of this other aspect to their ruler. 

Andrew I saw in the evenings, when Perry and John spent their time in private together. I always found Andrew surrounded by friends. Only once, when I arrived earlier than usual, did I happen upon Andrew alone, and on that occasion his conversation was so constrained that it gradually dawned on me that he wished a chaperone to be present. I nearly laughed until I realized the unpleasant implications of the fact that Andrew felt it necessary to guard himself against me. 

I had been invited three times now to spend time with Ursula, but I had sent polite rejections back to each of the invitations. I could not possibly cram more time into my days than I already had. 

"Dozens of songs," I replied dismally to Perry. "And while you may have a memory that will allow you to remember the path of an ant you saw five years ago, mine cannot cope with being drained at this rate. You'll have to give me at least a few minutes between songs to think about what I know." 

"I used to hate my memory," said Perry. He was sitting on the floor underneath a wall-hung, face-sized mask of the Jackal – not the ruler's actual mask, Perry assured me, but one of the god-masks that hang in Koretian homes as an aid to worship. "I wanted to be able to forget everything that happened to me. Then I met John, and I had him to remember, as well as the things he had me memorize as a thief. But this is the first time I've ever wanted to remember something that wasn't connected with John." Perry stood up suddenly to pick something up and carry it over to the shuttered, narrow window. With his back to me, he said, "John tried to take away my memory of the fire once, but the god wouldn't allow it." 

I watched Perry open the shutter a crack, release the beetle he had found, and quickly close the shutter again. As he return to his place, I asked, "Did he try any of his other powers to help you?" 

"He tried almost everything. Finally John said that there must be some reason why the god wanted me to be mute, so we should devote our energy to discovering the reason." 

"You said he tried almost everything. What didn't he try?" 

I was still on my back, my head hanging over the side of the bed. Now, as I saw Perry's expression change, I turned quickly over onto my stomach. With his eyes lowered, he said, "He didn't try the Sun God rite." 

"What is that?" I asked. 

He looked up at me, eyes wide with puzzlement. Then he smiled. "You don't know Koretian religion, I suppose – I hadn't realized that. Every god has his own rite of worship; in the Jackal's rite, for example, a goat is brought in for sacrifice. Actually, the goat is called in, because the rite demands that the victim come of its own free will. Then the goat is bound to the altar, and one or two priests act as witnesses, like in a court case, giving the reasons why the goat should either live or die. At the end, the priest, speaking for the god, says whether the god wishes the victim to die. Then the priest either kills the goat or he doesn't, depending on the answer." 

"What about the Sun God rite?" I asked. 

"The Sun God—" Perry stopped, and then said, "The Sun God is the god of healing; that's why John prayed to him for my life when I was seventeen. Priests use the Sun God rite to ease the pain of those who are wounded, usually those who are dying a painful death. They can do this because one difference from the Jackal rite is that, if the god doesn't accept the sacrifice offered, he will offer a gift of healing in return. So John thought that if he performed the Sun God rite over me, the god might take my fears from me." 

I said hesitantly, "It seems to make sense. Why did he decide not to do that?" 

Perry swept the floor with his blackened hand, his gaze once more lowered. "Well, you see," he said, "the other difference about the Sun God rite is that the sacrifice is human." 

I must have made some sound, for Perry's gaze shifted up toward me. He said softly, "That's why the rite is usually performed only on the dying. If the Sun God accepts the sacrifice, it isn't such a terrible ending. The victim would have died in any case." 

"May the Spirit preserve us," I whispered. "I'm glad you didn't try it." 

"John and I discussed it, but we decided that it was too much of a risk. I'm not like that Daxion soldier. I've never liked the idea of dying." 

His eyes shifted away once more, but this time in the direction of the doorway next to the bed. I followed his gaze, then quickly pulled myself up from the undignified position I had been lying in. For a moment I felt resentment at the visitor for not knocking. Then I realized that Perry could not have answered a knock with his voice. 

Perry had a smile on his face, but of course he said nothing, as the visitor had not yet said anything. The man came over to Perry's side, knelt down a few feet from him, and placed a loaf of bread on a low table nearby. 

"From Mary," Hollis said. "She thought that you might want a change from city food." 

"Thank you," said Perry. "The palace food is too rich. I often wish I was back at the priests' house." 

"Come visit the farm some time soon, and I'll have Mary make us a real country meal. I never get to see you these days. The Jackal has you busy all of the time, working for him." 

Perry hesitated before saying, "Is it all right for me to come at night?" 

"I'm not sure I'd recognize you if you turned up at the farm in daylight." Hollis looked my way, saying, "You're welcome as well, Princess – if you don't mind the fact that my wife will probably inveigle you into feeding the pigs or taking over some other chore I've neglected." 

I laughed. Perry said defensively, "You have too much to do. You should hire another hand." 

"Far too much to do, and there's a council meeting tomorrow." Hollis sat down on the dusty floor. He was in no danger of spoiling his clothes, as they were already torn and covered in dirt. "The Jackal wants you and the Princess to attend. The Prince has sent his terms for a peace settlement." 

Perry nodded. I said cautiously, "I don't know how it is in this land, but in Daxis you need the High Lady's permission to attend a council meeting. Has the Jackal checked with his High Lord about having me there?" 

Hollis looked over at Perry, his eyes bright. Across Perry's face spread the broadest smile I had seen on him until that time. 

"Oh," I said in a small voice. 

"It is my fault for not introducing myself properly." Hollis rose to his feet, took his tattered hat in hand, and offered me an elaborate, sweeping version of the free-man's greeting. "I am Hollis, High Lord of the Jackal's Council, Royal Correspondent to the Lands Beyond Koretia, Second Blade to the Subcommander . . . I forget all the rest. Andrew invented a dozen titles for me to impress the Emorians with, but I doubt that the Jackal would use any ceremony in his government if it weren't for the fact that we have the Daxions and Emorians looking over our shoulders." 

The ease with which he accepted my mistake encouraged me to say, "I think that I must be too Daxion to understand Koretia. This is a land of disguises: so far I have met a spy who turns out to be a lord, a trader who is a ruler, and now a farmer who is a High Lord and who invites me, recently a slave, to attend his council." 

"If you are going to found a government on a rebellion run by common folk, that is the risk you take," replied Hollis with a smile. 

"It was like that in the old days, before the Emorians conquered us," said Perry. 

"Yes, Koretians have never allowed a hard division between master and servant. That is something the Emorians cannot accept – as Andrew learned to his cost. But here in Koretia, thank the gods, we are all free-men." And he gave another sweep of his ragged hat before disappearing out the door.


	9. Chapter 9

"Where should I sit?" I asked the next morning. 

Brendon gave a vague glance at the aged planks of the Koretian council table. "The Jackal usually sits at the head of the table in order to see everyone," he replied. "I suppose that it doesn't really matter where else you sit, does it, Hollis?" 

Hollis was talking to one of the half dozen council lords already seated at the table. He looked over and said, "Perhaps we ought to have Andrew draw up a seating plan for us so that we can impress the Emorians." 

"With the lords ranked by seniority?" Andrew looked up from the Prince's peace settlement proposal, which was being passed around the table. "I think that you would find your interest in rigid hierarchy fading after a short while." 

"The Emorians' concept of rank can't be that rigid if they accept you as our ambassador," said one of the lords. 

"Believe me, their High Lord has never recovered from the shock of having to treat one of his former slaves as an equal." Andrew pushed the sheet across the table to Perry, who was just seating himself to the right of the Jackal's chair. Perry did not look at it before placing it as far as possible down the table. One of the council lords had been on the point of taking the chair next to Perry's, but with the smoothest of motions, he moved down a seat. 

I looked around at the nearly empty table. "Is this the size of your council?" 

"There is an official list of lords," said a voice behind me, "but in practice the council consists of whomever I can drag into this chamber at any given time to help me with the unrewarding work of running a government." 

I looked back; the Jackal was standing in the doorway, smiling at me. Though even Hollis had taken the trouble to wear more than his usual work clothes, John was not wearing the free-man's weapon demanded by formal dress, nor had I ever seen him carry a blade except in the hospital. On reflection, I decided that for the hunting god to carry a weapon would be superfluous. 

Dangling from his left hand was something made of stiff black cloth. A warm breeze made its way through the large window opposite; we were in the royal residence, which had Koretian-style windows. The breeze turned the object slightly so that I caught a glimpse of silver and gold paint. 

This, then, was the Jackal's mask, the concealment that the ruler donned when he spoke with the voice of the god. 

I suppose that I must have been staring at it with some apprehension. John placed it facedown on the table as he seated himself, saying quietly, "I rarely use it during council meetings." 

"You rarely use it because the rest of us would like to live to the end of our natural lives without prematurely dying of fear," said Brendon. 

John smiled as the others in the room laughed, but said seriously, "Consider yourself lucky that you do not have to serve as the god's voice. James told me last year that wearing the face of the Chara in judgment for only a few minutes took as much out of him as running from one end of his palace to another. Given the size of the Chara's palace, it made me wonder whether he would live even as long as his predecessor." 

There was the sound of a breath drawn in, and then a momentary choke. I looked over and saw that it was Perry, making one of his rare and futile attempts to speak outside the circle of his friends. John evidently heard Perry as well. He did not look his way but said, "I, on the other hand, plan to outlive the rest of you – with the possible exception of Andrew, whom the god expels from the Land Beyond at regular intervals. How does your head feel?" 

"As though nothing had happened," Andrew replied. His eyes were following my progress as I came over to sit next to Perry. 

"That could mean either that you are perfectly well or that you are not quite on the point of passing out," said Hollis. "Don't fall unconscious before the end of the meeting, please; I may need your help in sorting through Brendon's report. Will you begin, Jackal?" 

The conversations among the other men in the room gradually died out. John waited until everyone was looking his way before saying, "I seek your service and your thoughts, and no man who speaks with truth in this place need fear my vengeance. In turn, I pledge my mercy and my service toward all here, as I am prepared to suffer for my people." 

The Jackal spoke these words in a relaxed manner, as though exchanging information with friends, but the formality of the words made me decide that Hollis had not been quite truthful the night before when he said that Koretians disdained ceremony. All of the ceremony I had seen in Koretia so far had been religious, and while the Jackal's subjects might treat him as though he were their equal, I suspected that hidden beneath this treatment was a hierarchy as rigid as the one in Emor. 

The conversation which followed served to confirm my growing belief that Koretians were masters of disguise. I had eavesdropped on a few meetings of the Daxion council; outwardly at least, the Jackal's council could not have been more different. The High Lord rarely called upon any of the men present; whoever wanted to talk simply spoke up and gave his views. As far as I could tell, there was no formal procedure for voting; the conversation simply continued until an agreement had been reached. 

John remained silent for the most part, his gaze switching from one speaker to another. Only at one point did the casual rhythm of the meeting stop abruptly. An agreement had been reached not to drive the Daxions out of their half of the mountain cave. John caught Hollis's eye and shook his head. Hollis held up his hand, and the buzz of whispered asides that made a continual background to the meeting died out. He looked around the table at the lords. Having polled each man with his eyes, he said formally, "Overrule not disputed." The conversation continued as it had before. 

Andrew was the one man at whom Hollis had not looked. He came over to my side now and placed the peace settlement terms in front of me. Rather than explain that I could not read, I whispered to him, "The Jackal can overrule the council?" 

Andrew leaned over and said in a low voice, "The Jackal can overrule the council, and the council can overrule the Jackal on his judgments in rare cases. The Emorians don't like the latter law. That is why Koretia nearly went to war with them six years ago." 

Andrew slipped away to his seat before I could ask more. Brendon had finished his report, and Hollis was saying, "So now we turn to the matter of the peace settlement. As you have all seen, the settlement proposed by Prince Richard is for the most part straightforward with the exception of the last two items. One of these is the question of the mountain boundary. The Prince is adhering to his father's demand that we cede the mountain to Daxis." 

"I don't think that there can be any question as to whether we allow that term to stand," said one of the lords. 

"It is just a question of whether we consider it worthwhile to continue fighting for the whole mountain," said another. 

"Well, I'm not going to devote this meeting to arguing about that," said Hollis. "I need to be home by sunset; I have cattle to tend. I suggest that we discuss that matter amongst ourselves outside the meeting. In the meantime, we can pass on to the final item, which is the Prince's demand for Princess Serva's return." 

I looked over at Perry. He was evidently the only other one present who had not read the terms; I could see reflected on his face the shock that I felt. I switched my gaze to Andrew, but as always, his expression was impenetrable. 

John said, "The Prince demanded this at the time he and I exchanged our peace oaths on the battlefield." 

"And your response?" asked one of the lords. 

"I told the Prince that the Princess is under Andrew's care. I also pointed out to him that Lord Andrew is not my subject, and I suggested that he approach Andrew himself. Has he?" John glanced over at Andrew. 

Andrew shook his head. "I don't think he will. He seems unduly apprehensive of me." 

"I doubt that the border incident will have reassured him in any way," said Brendon with a wry smile. "So, unless the Princess has a strong desire to return to the loving arms of her cousin . . ." 

All eyes lay upon me. I shook my head. Hollis said briskly, "Then we may strike that term from the settlement. Now, the Prince has offered his terms. Are there any that we wish to propose?" 

"I think that we aren't dealing with the real issue," said one of the lords. "The real question is whether Daxis would abide by the settlement. Thirty years ago, Daxis secretly broke its alliance with Koretia and allowed the Emorian armies passage in order to attack our land. Do we have any reason to believe that Daxis will prove faithful to this settlement?" 

"Koretia broke a peace oath with Emor at the beginning of the Border Wars." It was Andrew, speaking for the first time. "That is one reason why the other two of the Three Lands consider Koretians treacherous. As for Daxis, there was some dispute among the Daxions about whether their alliance with Koretia was in accordance with Daxion law." 

A babble of voices ensued as the council lords vied to present their opinions of Daxis. While the Daxions considered the Koretians treacherous and deceitful, it appeared that the Koretians believed the Daxions to be insular and unwilling to learn new ways. Whenever a bargain was broken – the examples ranged from the earlier alliance to marriage vows made between Koretians and Daxions – the Daxions always claimed that they were simply following the ways of their ancestors. The Spirit had created Daxis, the Spirit was unchanging, and therefore Daxis was unchanging – that was the thrust of the Daxions' argument. Nothing would ever be different in Daxis, and Daxions need not comply with the customs of other lands. 

My face grew hotter and hotter during this exchange, thinking of how many times since my arrival I had ridiculed Koretian customs. The others were careful not to look my way, with the exception of Perry and Andrew. Perry looked angry – not because he had any opinions on the matter, I was willing to guess, for it had become clear through my conversations with him that his interest in high matters was confined to the tasks that John assigned him. Rather, it appeared that he regarded this whole conversation as an insult directed toward me. Andrew, on the other hand, was confining his contribution to disinterested and objective interjections of facts, both in favor of and against Daxion ways. Occasionally his cool glance would rest on me, but never for long. 

Finally he said, "The trouble with this conversation is that we ought not to be having it. We ought to know the Daxions well enough by now that we need not guess at what their motives are for doing things." 

"That's my fault," said the Jackal. He had remained silent throughout the debate. "You wanted to go to Daxis a year ago to travel amongst the bards, and I gave you other assignments instead." 

"Much as I enjoy my reputation as the man from whom all peace settlements derive, I don't think that this should be my sole responsibility," said Andrew. "I am not the only thief who travels widely in other lands. I think, John, that you ought to have your spies devote as much time to learning the customs of other lands as they do to ferreting out military information." 

John did not reply to his suggestion, but simply asked, "What is your solution to the present problem?" 

"If the Daxions are too parochial to adopt other lands' customs, I suggest that we meet them on their own ground. I came across one of their customs while trading in the land. Princess, could you explain about bargains made in the Spirit?" 

Once again a dozen pairs of eyes turned toward me. "Well," I said, trying to pretend that I was a real princess and therefore used to this sort of attention from noblemen, "the difference between bargains made in the law and bargains made in the Spirit is like the difference between a meeting of the Daxion council and this meeting. Rather than one merchant proposing a bargain, then another merchant disputing the proposal and offering his own bargain, and so on, the merchants work together to decide what would be best for both of them. They strive to discover what interests they have in common, rather than where the differences between them lie." 

"Which cuts out the trader, so I wasn't initially happy to encounter this custom," said Andrew. "But it seems to me that it could be adopted for the present negotiations." 

"I don't see that we would gain any advantage in that way," said a lord. "The Daxions could easily say they were trying to work with us and then later claim that they just hadn't understood what we were proposing." 

"Call in a bard," I said. 

The lords' voices buzzed for a moment. One of them asked politely, "What good would that do, Princess?" 

I looked at Andrew, helpless in answering a question that would never be asked in Daxis. It was John, however, who said, "Bards bring an element of truth into any event that occurs in Daxis. I think you're right, Andrew; I ought to have allowed you to look into the question of Daxis's music. It's too easy for me to become worried about Koretia's immediate dangers and not think about her long-term future amongst the Three Lands." 

He was fiddling with the strap of his mask. I realized that he must be debating with himself whether to call upon the powers within him that took him past the knowledge of an ordinary man. A fierce and sudden instinct told me that he should not. 

At that moment, our eyes met. In the exchange of glances that followed, I felt as though I had just joined the Jackal's council and become one of his advisors. Then the god-man's fingers slipped from the mask strap, and he looked back at Hollis. 

The High Lord was ending the meeting; evidently John was due in the court after the noonday break. As the other council lords left, Hollis came over and gave a pile of papers to John, saying, "These are beginning to flood in: requests for the council to help those who have lost their homes and shops. I don't know where to begin with them. We don't have Emor's treasury, so we can't rebuild the city from the ground up the way the Chara did after the first fire." 

John began to shuffle through their the pages, saying as he did so, "I suggest that we look first at those requests that will benefit the greatest number of people, then handle the others case by case. Here is a request for us to help rebuild the market stalls. That's surely something we need to do." 

"Houses are important as well," said Hollis. "Many of the city dwellers have moved in with outside families and friends, but some are still camping in the neighboring countryside, and we're running out of rooms in the palace to house families temporarily. We've received a request by a man – a former Emorian, ironically – who wants to build some houses and act as landlord for them. He says that he has had experience with that sort of work in the past." 

John leafed through the pile and pulled out the request in question. Andrew, who had been watching our side of the table, said, "John." 

John followed his gaze. "What is it, Perry?" 

"I was just wondering," said Perry, freed from his silence. "Was the Emorian's name Valerian?" 

John glanced down at the sheet. "You know him?" 

Perry's voice grew softer and more strained. "I did once. He's the man I ran away from before I met you – the one who tried to make me light a fire." 

There was the briefest of pauses. Then John, without any drama in his gesture, tore the request in half. 

Perry stared wide-eyed at the torn page. "That was twenty-five years ago. I only knew him for a week." 

"That is a week you will never forget," said John. "He is paying a small price by comparison. . . . The request was addressed to the council, Hollis. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?" 

"Only that I wish you had given me the pleasure of tearing up the request myself." The grim look on Hollis's face contrasted starkly with his usual calm presence. 

Perry continued to look troubled. John added, "I think the best thing for me to do, Hollis, is to go through these requests. Perry and I will combine our knowledge of the city dwellers to judge the characters of the men making the requests. Do you think that you could ask one of the servants to bring our meals in here? I would rather finish this before going to the court." 

Without a word, Andrew stood up. I joined him and Hollis in leaving the chamber. At the doorway I looked back. John was reading names to Perry, who was commenting on what he remembered John telling him about the people in years past. Perry made no attempt to read any of the requests, but as I watched, he drew his chair closer to John. 

o—o—o

A few minutes later, Andrew and I had passed beyond the shining golden blocks of the royal residence and were walking once more through the neat marble corridors of the main palace. 

We passed along our way a number of men and a handful of women, all treading purposefully to or from their jobs. A few gave the free-man's greeting to Andrew, but most passed by us with their expressions free of interest. 

"Not many people seem to know you here," I remarked. 

"I don't visit the palace very often; you remember, I told you that back in your father's dungeon. I'm actually better known at the Chara's palace, since I spent so many years there." Andrew looked over at me. "What did you think of the meeting?" 

I supposed he must be referring to my unexpected appearance in the peace settlement terms, but my mind was still on the scene we had just left. "I can't imagine my father ripping up an official request like that for the sake of a friend," I said. 

"Is that a criticism of John or just a comment?" Andrew asked. 

"A question, really. The talk in the meeting about the different customs of Koretia and Daxis made me realize that I took for granted that the Jackal rules in the same manner as the King." 

Andrew stopped in the corridor in front of a row of brightly-painted god-masks. He reached forward to adjust one that had tilted out of place. "John has certainly been forced to put his duty above friendship at times," he said, "but he told me once that he believes that the true test of a ruler is how he treats his friends. Koretians believe that loyalties to friends are as important as loyalties to the land." 

We continued on, passing by chambers with their doors open. The first was a library where men were reading old books and scribing new ones, the second was a kitchen, the third was empty, the fourth contained an altar, the fifth was empty. 

Andrew noticed my interest. "When John first ascended the throne, there had never been a strong central government in Koretia, so he based his palace life on that of the Emorians. Of course that proved too complicated for Koretia, so he has been gradually cutting back, discarding what doesn't work here and retaining what does. The Emorian courts, for example, have been a great boon to Koretia." He stopped and waved me through a doorway. I found myself in a room somewhat smaller than the council chamber, filled only with seats and a flat, wooden version of the Jackal's mask that filled most of the opposite wall. 

"The Jackal's Court," explained Andrew. 

"It's very small," I said with surprise. 

"The Jackal holds most of his judgments in private and transfers many of his cases to the city court. He doesn't even like to reach the stage where he has to resort to the law. He prefers judging people in the Spirit, as you would put it. He says his main goal is to bring repentance to the lawbreaker, and he uses whatever tool best accomplishes that." 

"Unlike the Emorians." Between Andrew's back scars and Perry's inner scars, I was beginning to feel quite bitter toward our neighbors to the north. 

Andrew gave me one of his unreadable looks. "The Three Lands have a great deal in common." 

"The Emorians are atheists," I countered, aghast that Andrew should be defending his abusers. 

"Most Emorians are agnostic as to the existence of gods, but the manner in which they venerate their Chara has deep roots. The oldest Emorian laws refer to a Lawgiver. Scholars have speculated that the early Emorians worshipped the Lawgiver as a god." 

As I thought about this, my gaze drifted over to the Jackal's mask on the wall. On the first occasion of our meeting, I had seen John's face overlaid with his god-mask; now I could not look at the mask without seeing beyond it the gentle eyes of the Koretian ruler. I said, "Perry seems to worship John, not only as a god, but also as a man." 

"Perry isn't the only one to be tempted that way." 

I looked back at Andrew. His gaze was also fixed on the mask. His hand rested on the cream-colored hilt of his dagger, which he was wearing for the first time since I had met him. He was finally free from his bandage, though the wound had left an ugly line. He said, "When I returned to this city after my years in Emor, the first thing I discovered was that John hadn't died in the fire as I had thought. That was a moment of great joy. Then I was shocked to learn that my childhood blood brother was now a vessel for the god. And not long after that I discovered that Perry had taken the place that I had formerly held with John: he was now John's confidant." 

Andrew glanced over my way, his face in its usual expressionless state. He gestured with his head, and I followed him back into the dimly lit corridor. "It was as though I had lost my binding with my native land," he said. "For eight years I'd thought of myself as a Koretian, then for fifteen years I'd lived as an Emorian, and now I found myself without any land that I could claim as my home. It was soon afterwards that I asked John to send me out on missions throughout the Three Lands and into Emor's dominions and beyond. I've been wandering ever since then." 

A strain of music went through my heart then, from a song once sung in a dungeon cell. I caught my breath. Before I could say anything, a voice hailed Andrew. Turning, I saw a palace guard hurrying down the corridor, followed by an elderly man. 

"Andrew, do you know where John is?" asked the guard without preliminary. "This city dweller wants to have a word with him." 

"He told me to come by the palace if I needed anything," said the pot-bellied man, who had an anxious look on his face. "My granddaughter hurt her head on the night of the attack, and she has been feeling dizzy all of today. We thought John could have a look at her." 

Andrew was staring at the man with a curiously fixed expression, but all that he said was, "The Jackal is in conference right now, but if you wait outside the royal residence you can catch him when he comes out. The royal residence is just at the end of this corridor—" 

"I know the way," said the man. "John brought a group of us merchants to the council one time when he was composing some new trade laws. Thank you for your help." He casually gave Andrew the free-man's greeting as he left. 

Andrew did not return the greeting, but watched him go with a cool gaze. The guard, who had been watching the exchange, said, "Do you know Harold?" 

"I saw John bargain a trade with him once," replied Andrew. "You do realize, I hope, that John will cancel the court this afternoon and go see this girl the minute he hears about her." 

"Oh, I know," said the guard. "But this happens all the time, not only when the city burns down. I remember one occasion several years ago when John heard that some city women had been kept from entering his court; that was when we were still using Emorian court rules. He halted a trial in mid-judgment, went down to the city in search of these women, and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to them complain about how they weren't allowed to use the moat to wash their laundry. Then he spent the next few days helping them to build a laundering site along the moat. I hear that John is even toying with the idea now of moving out of the palace and going back to live in an ordinary house so that he can know better what's happening in the city. Do you think you can persuade him otherwise, Andrew? His subjects would love him for it, but the Emorians and Daxions would think less of him." He gave me a quick smile. 

"I'll see what I can do," Andrew said noncommittally. "Right now, Mauger, perhaps you'd better prevent the palace from crumbling under warfare. Harold has started an argument with one of the lords, and it looks as though there will be daggers drawn at any moment." 

Startled out of his casual pose, the guard darted down the corridor, shouting as he went. I did not see the outcome of the fight, for Andrew turned away and began walking down the corridor once more. As I hurried to catch up, I said, "Harold didn't appear to recognize you." 

"We only met briefly, and at the time I was wearing an Emorian tunic." There was a pause during which Andrew continued to look straight ahead. At last he added, "He refused to let me into his shop because I was Emorian. These days, my problem is usually the opposite: I receive suspicious looks from the Emorian city dwellers whenever I visit that land." 

He halted suddenly. Turning, he opened a door along the corridor. The sleeping chamber that opened to view was sparsely furnished, with few possessions to indicate who lived there. As Andrew stepped through the room rapidly, I followed him out onto a balcony beyond. 

For a moment all that I was aware of was the blackened city below, with just a few dots of color indicating that life was returning to the ruined streets. Then my gaze was pulled up toward the landscape beyond: first to a great sea of trees, and then to a ridge of black mountains in the distance. There beyond the mountains was my homeland – or so I thought for a moment, until I realized from the position of the sun that I was looking north toward the far-away black border mountains between Koretia and Emor. 

Andrew said, "I stay in this room when I visit the palace because it reminds me of when Peter and I stood on this balcony looking at the mountains. He was thinking of Emor, and I was thinking of Koretia. I don't know what to think of when I look at the mountains now." 

"Peter?" 

"The Chara Peter, my closest friend in Emor before his death. I suppose that if I have any ties in this world, it is my friendships; I have been very lucky in that regard. But still . . ." His voice trailed off. 

I leaned back against the wooden frame bordering the balcony and contemplated Andrew, whose gaze was fixed to the mountains. I sensed that the thief who had been able to detect Derek's far-off presence on the palace grounds was now barely aware of my presence next to him. I opened my mouth, closed it, looked at Andrew's pained eyes, and finally said, "Another way to have ties is through a family. Have you ever thought of marrying?" 

Andrew did not move, but I saw the same change overcome him that I had once seen in the King's dungeon: the lines of his face, relaxed though unreadable, turned rigid. Without looking my way, Andrew said, "I do not wish to be . . . unappreciative of your advice, Princess, but I seem to recall telling you in Koretia that I do not form that type of relationship with women." 

His eyes were now angry, but some instinct of mine told me that his pain had not disappeared; it had simply been overlaid by this other part of him. Andrew may have built barriers, as John had said, but they were not sufficient to keep out whatever pain was causing him to remain restless and unsatisfied. 

It was this thought that gave me the courage to say, "You didn't say why." 

He turned then. It was with no great surprise, though with considerable fear, that I watched him draw his dagger, walk over to me, and plunge the dagger into the wood a few inches from my head. He leaned over me, saying softly, "I could give you many answers, but let this one suffice. The Prince failed to mention one of my other notorieties: I am known as the most treacherous man in the Three Lands. I have broken oaths of loyalty to two lands. I betrayed the Chara Peter three times before his death, and I have done the same to the Jackal. And you yourself have had a taste for how I treat my friends." 

He stayed where he was a moment more, and then pulled the dagger out of the wood and sheathed it. He turned back to the balcony rail and for a while he said nothing, but simply stared at the scene before him. His eyes did not change, but his voice was normal when he said, "So I make no vows of loyalty any more. I have not given an oath of loyalty to the Jackal, and my friends understand that my first loyalty is to the god, no matter where that leads me. They accept me despite this – as I said, I have been lucky. But I cannot promise that I will be able to care for a wife, putting her before all else in my life, protecting her from harm, providing her with comfort and calm and contentment. And since I cannot promise this, I will make no marriage vow." 

I looked at him with some puzzlement, wondering whether he remembered the words we had spoken upon our parting six years before in Daxis. I said, "If that is the sort of vow you must make in Koretia, then I don't blame you for not marrying. When we sing our marriage vows in Daxis, all that we pledge is to help each other serve the Spirit and to be loyal and true to each other." 

"True to each other." Andrew said the words in a low voice, and then turned to look at me. He said softly, "The one promise which ought never to be made is for truth, as that is a promise which cannot be kept. And perhaps, in light of your unspoken reasons for raising this subject, you may understand why I say this." 

He turned without a word and left the balcony. I was frozen on the spot, pinned by the unseen dagger; then I remembered Andrew and hurried back to the corridor door. 

He was already halfway down the corridor, passing Perry without stopping. Perry stared back at him with a startled expression before coming over to stand by me. 

There was no one around us. I said, "Did you and John finish going through the requests?" 

Perry nodded. "What happened with Andrew?" 

I looked back down the empty corridor, seeing again Andrew's body as he departed. "I asked him a question that was not entirely disinterested," I said, "and I received the answer I deserved." I returned my gaze to Perry. He was watching me with puzzlement but was too filled with his own private thoughts to intrude on another person's secrets. "Have I taught you the Song of Dead Hopes?" I asked. 

Perry shook his head. I said, "It is an oddly cheering song, I suppose because it makes you realize how small your problems are in comparison with others'. Come back to my room, and I'll teach it to you."


	10. Chapter 10

The palace was silent. Sounds echoed throughout the dungeon, where I stood: groans from the wounded soldiers, the clatter of bowls being washed, chatter from the guards standing nearby. But nowhere was there music. The last of the wounded Daxions had been sent back over the border; the Spirit's power had disappeared from this land. 

There was only one place where I could go to seek the healing song I required, and it was too late in the night for that. Although the Jackal appeared to be above such human necessities as sleep – he spent most nights in the hospital, helping the other doctors – Perry would be asleep by now, perhaps dreaming songs as Daxions do. I looked with longing for a moment at the lightly guarded entrance to the royal residence, then turned and began walking down the corridor that ran alongside it. 

It took me some time to realize that this corridor was unlit. Then I found myself turning with astonishment to stare at the golden blocks that marked what had once been the exterior of the Koretian Council Hall. I had noticed on the first occasion I saw them how they seemed to glow in the shadows; now I realized that the glow arose, not from any reflection, but from some inner light. I reached out my hand to touch one of the blocks, and at that moment I heard singing. 

It came, very faintly, from behind the wall. I had been able to hear it, I realized in the next moment, because the block I was standing next to was loose in the wall. 

With my heart pumping hard, I looked back down the corridor. The guards had been standing inside the entrance to the royal residence when I left; from here, I could not see them. Touching the block, I found it to be both cool and soft, as though it were covered in moss. With a swiftness that came from long experience with these matters, I worked the block loose until I was able to grab hold of its edges and pull it out. There was no mortar to hinder me; this part of the palace seemed to be built without mortar. The next block was loose as well, and the next . . . After a few minutes' work, I had taken out enough blocks that I could pull myself through the waist-high hole I had just created. 

There was no way for me to pull the blocks back in afterwards. I could only pray that the guards did not notice the luminous pile in the corridor and come to investigate. The gap in the wall, though, gave me just enough light to see that I was standing in a narrow corridor, barely wide enough for me to pass, and extending up into darkness beyond my sight. Directly in front of me was a ladder against the wall. All around me the winds sang their song. 

This was too much for me; I felt as though the breath of the Spirit was heavy upon me. I had to remind myself forcefully that the King's palace was built in the year that Daxis was founded, that the Three Lands were all founded in the same year, and that the Koretian Council Hall might therefore have been built around the same time, perhaps even by the same architect. If so, the builder had taken care that both his designs should contain the same hidden passage. 

As I scrambled up the ladder, I tried to remember the layout of the royal residence. The underground area, I knew, was where the servants' quarters were located, while the Jackal's quarters, the Council Chamber, and a few small guest chambers were on the topmost floor of the residence. The ground floor was the one I could not remember visiting. And so, more out of curiosity than anything else, when I reached the gap underneath the floorboards to this level, I squeezed myself into it. 

The passage was quite cold and also very dusty, but to my relief I encountered no rats or other beastly defenders of their territory, just an occasional spider who scuttled away as my head broke its web. I could no longer see where I was going. After a while, I began to feel uneasy at crawling blindly into a passage I did not know; I no longer had the fearlessness of my childhood. In any case, the room above me was evidently empty, for I could hear no sound. I remembered now that it was the presentation chamber, used by the Jackal to receive his guests; it was unlikely to be in use at this time of night. Besides, I reminded myself forcefully, I had no business sneaking around the Jackal's palace. I was a guest here and was enjoying the Jackal's protection. It was time to leave. 

So I thought, but in the next moment I heard a thump and then the sound of voices above me as two men walked into the room. And I had not heard many words before I had forgotten all my scruples and lay still on my stomach, listening to the men above with as much enthrallment as I had once listened to the Prince and his subcaptain. 

o—o—o

". . . The whole matter seems to revolve around the role of the Consort. I need to understand more about what it means to be a Daxion Consort. That might give me the clue as to why the Prince is so desperate to prevent Serva from marrying another nobleman. I might also be able to track down more information about the forbidden song. It's conceivable that Rosetta told another bard what the song contained." 

I had no trouble identifying the taut voice I heard. The other voice was initially harder to discern because it was so soft. 

"I'd like to let you go, but this isn't the right moment. Richard has refused to accept you as my ambassador, but I may be able to convince him eventually, since he is so eager for peace. I need you here if that happens." 

Wood scraped against the floor, and then footsteps moved across the room as Andrew walked away from his chair. "John, I _must_ get away from this palace. There's too much for me to do out there." 

"Such as escaping from Serva's presence?" 

The footsteps stopped. Andrew said in a voice even more constrained than usual, "Do you always pry into such matters with your god's eyes, John?" 

"Andrew, it hardly takes a god's vision to see what's happening. When I left the Council Chamber today, everyone was still clustered in a group outside, gossiping about the fact that the Princess of Daxis couldn't stop watching the Koretian Ambassador through the entire meeting." 

There was a sigh loud enough to penetrate the floorboards. Andrew said, "How am I going to get myself out of this? You'd think that, after all these years of being chased by power-hungry women, I'd have skill in such matters." 

I slipped my hand out from under my face and placed my cheek directly on the floor in order to cool the cheek's burning. John said, "Have you told her?" 

"I was hoping that she'd be able to guess. I was in her father's dungeon for a week and never grew a beard." 

"Well, since she obviously didn't guess, why haven't you told her since then?" 

"Because . . ." Andrew's pacing started up again. After a while, he said, "I suppose I still hoped that she would guess. You know I don't like talking about it." 

"Andrew, there's no way that she _could_ know unless someone told her. You've hidden the only other obvious clue by which she could guess." 

Andrew's footsteps stopped again. This time there was a longer pause before Andrew said, in a voice lowered by some emotion, "John, not even for you could I uncover that. I'm sorry if you think less of me for that." 

"Andrew . . ." John's chair scraped the floor, but Andrew had already moved rapidly away. John did not attempt to follow him. Instead he said, "Andrew, you remember the night that Peter gave Koretia into my care, and how the Unknowable God spoke through me with words that dazed. All of us said things to one another that night which I think we would we have said at no other time. When Peter and I were alone, he told me of the night when he was enthroned and when he gave you your freedom. He told me how Lord Carle came to his quarters before the enthronement and how, when he placed the Sword of Vengeance on Peter's belt for the first time, he told Peter that he was now a man. Peter said that that moment meant more to him than anything that happened at the enthronement. It was in hopes that you too would experience such a moment, he said, that he gave you your bone-hilted dagger – so that you would have a free-man's weapon and would be a man." 

"If I'd taken that blade with me to Daxis six years ago, I would have lost it there." Andrew's voice was muffled. "What kind of sign would you have taken the dagger to be then?" 

"A sign that, when half a dozen soldiers come to question you, you shouldn't resist them. Will you please listen to me?" 

There was pause, then a clink and a gurgle of liquid as Andrew poured himself a drink. "I'm sorry. Go on." 

"Peter said he wasn't sure at the time whether you understood the full significance of his gift. He was therefore surprised and pleased when, the day after his enthronement, you chose to take this discipline upon yourself as a sign that you had joined him in the world of men. So strong had been your adherence to that discipline, he said, that you did not break it even when you cried out in your sleep. He said it was an accomplishment that rivalled even the disciplines he took on as Chara. In short, he, like I, did not look down upon you for what you had done. Quite the opposite." 

Andrew's voice was very soft when he spoke again. "Thank you, John. As for myself, I've always seen it as a vanity." 

"It would be that only if you tried to hide from people the other aspect of what you are, and you've never done that. Not until now – that's why this matter with Serva worries me." 

Andrew's cup clinked as he put it down. He began pacing once more. "I doubt that it would make any difference if I told her. Every now and then, I meet a woman whose interest in me is noble enough that such a revelation only encourages her. Such a woman is sure that she can overcome this barrier; she treats it as though it were a smaller problem, like a Koretian marrying a Daxion. Serva would regard it that way, I'm sure. She wouldn't stop pursuing me." 

"She'd stop pursuing you if you told her that you didn't love her." 

I raised my head. Andrew had reached the far end of the room and had paused there. Try as I might, I could not hear his reply. 

"Ah." John was standing over me; that was the only reason I could hear his exceedingly quiet voice. "I knew that this would happen one day." 

"John, what is wrong with me?" I nearly bumped my head against the floorboards above me as I started in shock upon hearing for the first time Andrew's voice raised high in passion. "When I was forced by circumstances to kiss her during our flight— I thought that I had myself back under control by the time we left Daxis, but ever since that god-cursed encounter in the moat— It must have something to do with nearly losing my life twice in one day. It's absurd— It's twisted and perverted and abnormal for me to feel this way." 

"What's twisted about it? She's a woman, you're a man—" 

_"I am not a man!"_

The floorboards vibrated under Andrew's shout, sending wood-specks drifting down upon me. By the time they had settled, John was saying in the hard voice I had heard him use toward the Daxion soldier, "Now I know that you have gone mad with love. I have never seen you show self-pity about this before." 

Quiet and weary-sounding, Andrew said, "It's not self-pity; it's the truth. I will never be a man. That potential was taken from me at age eight, on the day I arrived as a slave in Emor." 

Just as firmly as before, John said, "Andrew, you may have travelled a great deal further than I have, but I've met more people in my work than you have. When I was leading the rebellion, my life depended on my picking thieves who could be depended on to hold to a man's duties and not waver in a crisis. There are a great many boys in this land who have cut their hair and grown their beards, but are not and never will be men. You, on the other hand, are most definitely a man. The Emorians could not take that from you when they made you a eunuch." 

I had slipped my hand back under my cheek. This is what saved me from crying out; I was able to smother the sound before it travelled far. As I lay there biting my hand, Andrew said in the same weary voice as before, "Well, it doesn't enter into the problem. Even if I were a man, I can't be a husband and take on a husband's duties. You will admit that much at least." 

"You've seen me bargain enough trades that you should know better than to think I would accept a flimsy argument like that. If you mean that you and Serva cannot mate, that is true enough, and perhaps a point in your favor, as it would be dangerous for her to childbear for the first time at her age. If you mean that you cannot please each other in bed, then I refuse to believe that you can be so innocent in such matters. There are plenty of ways in which you can satisfy each other. I would be glad to offer you advice if you need it." 

There was a noise that sounded like Perry's choke when he tried to speak at the wrong moments. This was followed by John's laugh. "By my eyes, Andrew, if you continue looking like that, I'll tell everyone it's a lie that you can't show strong emotions." 

"John, how in the name of the dead Charas—? You haven't—?" 

"No, of course I haven't, but every other person in this palace has, and I hear about most of it. That's one of my duties as palace priest, to help sort out domestic matters. I probably know more on the subject, at least in theory, than Prince Richard himself. But I hope you'll agree with me about this. You were the one who told me that the men who cut you weren't butchers. They left you with the ability to feel desire." 

Andrew's voice was once more subdued when he replied. "I've often felt that they showed their greatest cruelty in leaving me with a desire I couldn't satisfy." 

"Even if you had no bodily desire, you would still have a desire of the spirit. The first conversation we ever held was about the sort of woman you wanted to marry – and you were only six at the time. Well, now you have the opportunity to satisfy both desires." The floorboards creaked as John moved closer to Andrew. "God of Mercy, Andrew, you make Serva sound like a child. In certain ways, she has a clearer vision than you do; she has no need to be shielded from the truth. If you tell her about you, she is not going to fool herself into thinking that this is a small problem or that her very real charms can overcome all your difficulties." 

"How can I give her the truth, John? The very manner in which I sung my marriage vow would be a lie." 

"I don't know the answer, but I'm not the one you should be asking. Ask Serva. If anyone can help you, she can." 

Andrew came forward from the far corner where he had been standing. His earlier rapid pace was now replaced by slow, dragging footsteps. "John, I know that," he said quietly. "But what can I give her? You know that more was cut from me in Emor than just my manhood. I'm still struggling, after all these years, to become something resembling a normal human being. I doubt that I'll succeed in my lifetime. It wouldn't be fair for me to bring Serva into this war I'm waging against myself. I need Serva, perhaps I even love her, but she deserves far better than me." 

John replied so softly that I had to raise my head to hear. "I understand how you feel. When you returned from your time with the Emorians, I could have wept when I saw what they had taken from you. It took me a while to realize that, for every trait that you had lost, you had created something new to replace it. If you had not gone to Emor, you would not be my ambassador today. If I can love you for what you are now, having known you as a child, then Serva can certainly appreciate and want you, since she'll never know the boy that you were. . . . Unless—" 

So long a pause followed that Andrew said, "Yes?" 

"There is something odd about Serva." John's voice sounded less certain than before. "I can't make out what it is, and the god is blinding me from seeing through to the answer. But I showed her my god's face when I didn't intend to, and that makes me wonder what mysteries she is hiding. Perhaps the Prince is further along the trail of these mysteries than we are." 

"So let me go search out the answer." 

John sighed and moved toward the wine-table; liquid gurgled as he poured himself a drink. "Has anything I've said had an impact on you? What about your promise to Serva? She is under your care. Are you simply going to abandon her to danger?" 

"She might be in greater danger if I stayed." 

"What do you mean by that?" 

This silence was longer than any which had taken place until that point. John did not break it. Finally Andrew said, in a voice once more gone rigid, "I drew my dagger against her today." 

John's voice was so soft that I barely could hear it. "Did you hurt her?" 

"Not in body. But you see why I have to leave. I swore to you fifteen years ago that I would use my blade only in your service – and then, when I realized that my loyalties could not be given permanently to any man, I made that same vow to the Unknowable God. Now I am forsworn. I will not deny that I have lain awake every night for the past week, trying to convince myself that Serva and I share a future together. But today's confrontation is all the evidence I need that it would be dangerous for both of us if I were to try. If allowing myself to love her means I might break that very thin barrier which has kept me from becoming god-cursed, it isn't worth the risk. I _must_ go, John, before I become something both she and you would hate." 

"You can't solve the problem by fleeing." 

"I know what the solution will be if I stay. Please release me, John. I beg of you." For once, Andrew's voice was hoarse with passion. 

John said quietly, "You don't need my permission to go, Andrew; you know that. If your service to the god requires you to leave, then it is for you to decide this matter." 

"I can't go unless you take Serva into your care." 

"Then consider it done." John came over to stand close to Andrew. Whatever communication took place next was not done in words. Then John stepped back and said, "As for your mission, I have some suggestions about that. If you—" 

He stopped. Andrew took a few paces forward and said, "What is it?" 

John was slow in replying. "Nothing. I'm sorry; what was I saying?" 

"John, don't be that way. I know your god's eyes. Were you seeing anything I should know about?" 

"Not at all." John started walking forward. "Actually, I was remembering that I have a map in my clerk's quarters that you ought to see before you leave. Can you come now?" 

So rapidly was he walking that he and Andrew had left the chamber before Andrew replied. I remained where I was, covered with dust-specks and shivering from the cold. Or perhaps it wasn't so much the cold as the realization that only a fool would eavesdrop upon a god-man.


	11. Chapter 11

It was with considerable apprehension that I went the following morning to the Jackal's presentation chamber, having received an official summons to meet with the ruler. 

I found the Jackal already in audience. At least, that is what it was called in Daxis when my father met with one of his subjects. But the phrase did not seem to fit the scene before me: a man sitting with his head bowed, mumbling softly, while the Jackal sat opposite him, dressed in his usual plain black tunic, with his hand placed over the man's. Though I entered silently, his gaze was already fixed on the doorway as I arrived. I was becoming used to John's disconcerting moments of precognition, which would flare forth without warning, like sparks from a hidden flame. He gestured me into the chamber with his head, unnoticed by the man, who was still staring at the ground as he finished his narrative. 

I went over to sit in the chair that John had indicated. I was now within the line of the man's sight and recognized him as a palace official with whom I had struck up a conversation two days before. He was a morose man with a drooping moustache and perpetually worried eyes – with good reason, it seemed, for I had managed to elicit from him the news that he was facing a host of problems at home, connected with his large family. 

I saw from the nervous flicker of his glance that he knew I was there, but he took no more notice of me. His attention was now focussed on John, who said quietly, "From what you tell me, I think that your case would not be well judged if I were to transfer it to the city court. You would not receive a sentence of mercy, for you cannot claim provocation, since your troubles at home are not directly connected with the crime. I'm afraid that the most you could hope for was a sentence of imprisonment, based on your not having clear understanding of what you were doing. Even then, such a sentence would be stretching the intent of the law. And so, if you wished to have your case heard by Emorian law, I would have to recommend to the city judge that you be given the maximum sentence of exile." 

The ball in the official's throat bounced rapidly up and down as the man swallowed several times before saying, "What do you recommend that I do, Jackal?" 

"That is your choice to make, but I am willing to give you the god's judgment if you ask for it. I cannot tell you what I would decide in such a case, so it is for you to decide whether your wrongdoing in this matter outweighs the wrongs you have done in your life." 

The official bowed his head, looking down at where John still had his hand placed. "I did not intend for it to happen, Jackal." 

"You may be sure that the god will take that into account." John spoke softly, but underlying his quietness was the same firmness I had heard when he talked to the Emorian soldier. 

The official sat for a while, biting his lip before he said, "Jackal, I don't know, I just don't know. I can't judge what sort of man I am in the eyes of the gods. But I won't be any good to my family if I'm sent away to prison or exile, so I'm willing to accept the god's punishment, even if— I'll leave it up to you to decide my case." He hesitated, then asked uncertainly, "Do I absolve you?" 

"You may if you wish," said John, "but it is not strictly necessary. It is the god who carries out the punishment in such a case." 

The official swallowed and looked down at the ground again. John's hand lingered on the official's hand a moment longer; then he stood and said, "Offer up the witness of your life to the god while I am gone. When I return, I will give you the god's decision." 

The man nodded, but he did not look up as John walked over toward me. I spent the time it took John to reach me to notice the peculiar homeyness of my surroundings. This, I knew, was where the Jackal held his official meetings, yet the chamber looked more like the living quarters of a house than a government room. I saw a hearth with half a dozen god-masks hanging on it; only the Jackal's mask was missing from the seven masks of the Koretian gods and goddesses. Near the hearth stood a table and benches made of rough-hewn wood. Aside from this, there were scattered about a few stools and crudely made chairs, a small organ that must have come from Daxis, a set of Marcadian shields, an Arpeshian tapestry along one wall that depicted a jackal peering out of its lair, and – perhaps a leftover from the time of Koretia's dominionship – an elegant set of marble and satin-cushioned chairs in the Emorian style. 

I stood and followed John as he walked over to a side door set into the wall. This in turn led into a small chapel. In that chamber was a set of honey-colored beeswax candles dripping near some god-mask badges. Nearby, a black-stone altar stood bare but for the iron hooks upon which – John had told me during a visit to the city chapel – a sacrificial goat would be tied. Hanging above the altar was the mask of the god to whom the chapel was dedicated. John reached over toward the black cloth face-shield and touched it with his fingers, this being the manner in which Koretians pray; then he placed his fingers under the mask and unhooked it from the line from which it hung. 

As he came over to stand by me again, he said, "Barlow has requested you as his witness; he doesn't want his friends or family to know what he has done. You needn't do this, for a witness is not strictly necessary in the rite, but it will be of comfort to him if you do. The witness serves as a symbol of all the other people the prisoner has known in his life, who take some share in what he has become, both good and bad." 

"I'll be glad to help, but I'm not sure I understand what is happening here." 

The Jackal returned to the altar, upon which the only direct light was shining; the one hole in the room was in the ceiling, directly above where the sacrificial fire was lit after the goat had been killed. He laid his mask on the stone slab and went over to a side cupboard, saying, "Emorian law by its nature can only take into account the actions of the prisoner that are directly connected with the crime. The best Emorian judges, such as the Chara, take the prisoner's character into account when passing their sentences. But here in Koretia we find the Emorian law-structure still too restrictive, and so we have adapted our religious rites to be used as an occasional substitute for Emorian law. This is the gods' law, in which the prisoner offers himself up for judgment to his god and is thereupon judged, not only for his specific crime, but for the deeds of his entire life." John, who had been rummaging around in the narrow cupboard, paused as he said, "The witness's one task is to ask, 'Does the god accept this sacrifice?' My judgments are based on the Jackal's rite, but the question appears in all of the Koretian rites. An answer of 'no' means that the god has found the prisoner innocent; an answer of 'yes' is followed by the god's sentence of sacrifice." 

"But what sacrifice—?" I stopped, watching as John pulled from the cupboard a curved dagger, its sheath made of gold that was decorated with red-speckled bloodstones. 

John did not look up as he clipped the sheathed dagger to his belt. "In some rites, such as the Sun God rite, the sacrifice demanded is always death, but that isn't the case with the Jackal's rite. If I suspected that the god would issue a sentence of death in this case, I would have Barlow hand-bound, and when I pronounced the sentence I would be holding my dagger unsheathed. In principle, the god can issue such a sentence any time that a prisoner is offered to him for judgment, since the man's whole character is taken into account. But I doubt that I will do so in this case." 

This sudden change of pronoun came at the moment that John touched his mask again. He held it in his hand, waiting, and I nodded, finding it suddenly hard to speak. John said in a straightforward manner, "Since I'm trying this case in private, I'll be using the short version of the rite; it won't take long." He opened the door for me. Standing to one side, he ushered me through. 

The official was standing next to his chair. As we entered the room, I saw him take a step backwards before he caught himself and stood stiffly at attention, a line of sweat travelling down from his forehead. I dared not look at John, walking a few steps behind me. Instead I smiled at the official, who transferred his uneasy gaze to me for one heartbeat, gave me a quivering smile, and then looked back at the Jackal. 

So did I, as I had now reached the official's side. Turning, I saw the sight I had briefly glimpsed on my first meeting with John: a black-coated figure with the body of a man and the face of an beast: golden eyes and needle-thin whiskers and teeth the shape of daggers. But this time, the god's face was paint upon a mask. I wondered whether Barlow realized that what lay behind the mask was far more terrifying. 

The Jackal's voice, when it came from behind the mask, was soft and sinister: "Barlow son of Deems, you have been charged with the crime of striking the Master of the Koretian Land. This crime took place before the witness of Hollis, High Lord of the Jackal's Council, who entered the charge against you. What plea do you offer for this charge?" 

The official's voice, which had been tentative before, now became tremulous as he said, "That I'm guilty, but that – that I was upset by other events in my life." His voice was reduced to a whisper. "I'm very sorry." 

"Do you willingly accept my judgment and sentence?" For some reason, the Jackal's voice, though it held all the intonations of John's voice a moment before, reverberated in such a way that, if I had not known whose face lay under the mask, I might never have guessed who was speaking. 

"Yes," breathed the official. 

John's calm black eyes, which were centered within the gold-rimmed eyeholes of the mask, turned my way. I asked, "Does the god accept this sacrifice?" 

"Yes." 

The official flinched as the word was pronounced; then he watched silently as the Jackal removed his mask. Speaking in his own voice now, John said, "The sacrifice demanded of you, Barlow, is that you undergo branding for this crime, as that public shame will serve to remind you at all times in the future of the consequences of your private acts. For the god knows of what your wife and children have endured under your hands, but because you offered this knowledge to him as part of your witness and showed repentance for what you had done, he will not ask a greater sacrifice of you than this." John let the mask dangle from his fingers as he stared hard at the official. "You are fortunate, Barlow." 

"I'm sorry, Jackal." The official's voice was hoarse now. "I just couldn't bring myself to tell you." 

"You told the god, which is what counts most. But if you had told me, I would have recommended the transfer of your case to the city court, so that you would be tried under Emorian law. The god showed you unusual mercy today." 

The official said nervously, "What happens now, Jackal?" 

"You asked for my private judgment, so it is up to you to arrange the sentence. Go to the dungeon and ask to speak to Sublieutenant Weylin. He'll carry out the sentence when you tell him what you want." The Jackal turned away and went over to stand by the hearth, his back to us. 

The official looked over at me, bewildered, so I gritted myself and said quietly to him, so that John could not hear, "If you'll wait a bit, I can come down with you." 

This brought the official back to himself. He said, with a dignified tone he had obviously dragged up from far away, "Thank you, Princess, but no. I am grateful to you for what you have already done." He turned and walked rigidly out of the chamber. 

It was some time before John turned around and said, "I'm sorry. I'm angry with myself for not suspecting Barlow's full tale. I very nearly had to use my blade there." 

As he came over to join me, I said, "A branding is a lesser sentence than he would have received in the city court, isn't it?" 

"Yes, so Barlow's gamble paid off, but it was a risky venture for him." He was silent a moment more, then gave me a forced smile. "Would you like some wild-berry wine, or have you given up on your attempt to persuade your palate to accept such an insult?" 

"I'd love to have some." As John pulled out a bottle of the wine, I added, "That wasn't nearly as frightening as I thought it would be. I suppose that the first time seeing you that way is the worst." 

John looked over at me, his brow wrinkled slightly. "It ought not to make any difference whether you have seen me before. Tell me, did you ever watch your father give judgment?" 

"Yes, of course." I stared down at the cup John had just handed me. "He didn't seem any different to me in the court than anywhere else. But I suppose that's because I grew up around him." 

I looked up at John again and saw that he was still wearing that expression of faint puzzlement. But all that he said was, "Perry will have told you by now that Andrew left the palace late last night on another of his missions." 

"Perry said that he himself is to serve as my escort to Emor," I said. I had to work hard to disguise the relief I felt that John evidently knew nothing about my eavesdropping the night before. 

John nodded as he waved me into one of the Emorian-style seats – in this case, it was a reclining couch covered with cushions. I pushed one of the cushions aside and saw that it had been hiding a small wine stain. Evidently the Jackal was making use of all that the Emorians had left in the land, however shabby it might be. 

"I think that you will be safer under the Chara's care than you would be under mine," he said. "I won't send a message to the Chara – such a letter might fall into the Prince's hands – but once you explain your story, I'm sure that the Chara will be willing to take you in as his guest. Andrew is a friend of the Chara James, as he was of the Chara Peter." 

I said hesitantly, "Are you planning on sending anyone else with us, or will Perry and I be making the journey alone?" 

John smiled. "I don't blame you for being apprehensive about Perry's ability to protect you, but in actual fact, Perry is a good swordsman. He can be ferocious in a sword fight; for reasons I'm sure you understand, he fears capture a great deal more than he fears death." 

"Well," I said, "I don't suppose that we'll be needing his sword skills as we travel up through Koretia." 

"I've no doubt that the Prince has sent his spies over the border with instructions to capture you if you venture outside my palace. That's one reason I'm sending you to Emor by way of Daxis." 

It was fortunate that the reclining couch was already stained; my wine dripped down upon it before I straightened the cup and said, "You think the Prince will assume that I'm still in Koretia?" 

"I hope that is what he'll think. In any case, I have a second motive for sending you back to Daxis." John had seated himself on the window ledge. His legs were drawn up toward his body in a relaxed pose, and he was balancing his cup on one knee. A southern breeze, pulling itself with great effort around the mountain looming outside, ventured into the room with a faint whistle of greeting. 

"Tell me, what do you think of Perry as a man?" 

John's question came so close to his previous night's conversation that I gaped at him for a moment before realizing who the subject of our talk was. Even then, though, I found myself having difficulty answering the question. "I haven't really thought about it," I said. "Perry is . . ." My voice faded. 

"He is a child." John's statement, which would have sounded harshly blunt coming from any other person, was spoken with quiet directness. "He is a man too, and has taken on a man's burdens, but he will always be childlike in certain ways. He knows this, and it is a source of great pain to him." 

John stared down at his cup, tracing the rim with his finger. "Perry's friends think I'm too hard with him, asking him to take on difficult tasks such as having him sing to that Emorian soldier. Even Andrew, when I asked him to train Perry as a spy several years ago, thought I was being cruel. But I'm the only one who remembers what Perry was like when he was young: mute and friendless, terrified of all other human beings, living the life of a wild animal—" 

John jerked his head around suddenly so that it was facing away from me toward the mountainside before him. He stayed that way for quite a while before turning his face back toward me. He added calmly, "You see how far he has come since then. He can even pass as a normal man at first glance. When the god came to me when I was eighteen and asked me to take on his power, I know that I would not have been brave enough to do so if I had not had Perry's example before me. Perry has more courage than any other person I know." 

I held my cup double-handed against my lips, my movement momentarily arrested by the image, not of Perry, but of John, facing as a young man the choice of whether to become a god-man. It had not previously occurred to me that this composed, quietly confident ruler had undergone any tests of his own. I said, my words having double meaning, "I'm not sure how he manages to do it." 

"He thinks of others, that is how. You'll find, as you get to know Perry, that he is incapable of trying anything new purely for his own sake. If I were to ask Perry to go to Daxis in order to learn more about this gift of his singing, he would be unable to do it." 

I put my empty cup down on a stone table nearby. The earthenware rang on the marble as I set it down. "So you're sending him to Daxis to protect me, and there he'll be able to hear other bards." 

John nodded. "You'll be of use to each other. It's lucky for Perry that you came along at this time." 

Something about the steady manner in which he looked at me while saying this made me ask, spontaneously, "Why did you send Perry to Daxis originally?" 

A smile crept onto John's face. "You have your father's gift for asking the right questions, Serva." 

"I had been wondering because I asked Perry this, and he didn't seem to want to talk about it." 

"If Perry doesn't want to talk about it, I can't give you a full answer, because it is his tale to tell." John laid his chin down on his arms, which were folded over his upraised knees, and said, "I'll tell you what little I can, though. The god sent Perry a dream fifteen years ago, a dream he also sent to me and Andrew." 

"To Andrew?" I had been doing my best all day to avoid any thought of Andrew, but now I began tracing my way back through my conversations with Andrew to see whether he had made any mention of this event. 

John must have guessed what I was doing, for he shook his head. "I doubt that Andrew would have mentioned it to you; he remembers very little of the dream. As for Perry, this is one of those occasions in his life where he wishes that his memory was less good than it is. He found the dream terrifying." 

"Did you?" I asked. 

"I found it mystifying; I'm still not sure what it means. But it included a song, and because Daxis is the land of songs, I knew that some day Perry would go there. That's why I have pressed him so hard during the past few years to stretch his limits." John swung his legs off of the window seat and rose, saying, "And now his limits will have to be stretched further, on such a long journey, but I know that he'll be able to stand the challenge." 

"I'm sure he will," I said, standing up. "It is kind of you to entrust his company to me." 

John gave a faint smile then, his eyes showing more sadness than I had seen in them before. "It's hard for me to part with him, but I'm glad that you have turned out to be the person who will help him with this. I think that he will receive a good deal of happiness from travelling with you." 

"I'm sorry that the two of you have to be apart like this," I said, "but Perry will be home before long." 

John turned back toward the mountain, as though tracing our route in his mind. After a while he said, "The only advice I will give you about Perry is to allow him to do hard things. Never force him to do anything – he has to take on challenges through his own free will – but give him the opportunity to try new challenges. Unless the god intervenes, Perry's boundaries will always be narrow, but I don't believe that he has found his full limits yet." 

He ushered me toward the door, stopping on the way to pick up his mask again. I looked down at the terrible visage that had hidden his face not long before and said, "Am I the only person who finds it hard to understand the way that you talk about the god, sometimes as though he is you, sometimes as though he is something separate?" 

John gave a quirk of a smile. "Hardly. It's even worse than most people realize; I try to make it easy for others. This mask, for example, isn't necessary, as you've already discovered. I put it on to alert people as to when I am taking on the god's power – or, with friends who can bear to see me naked-faced, I wear the fire of the god's eyes. Only on a few occasions have I suddenly spoken in the god's voice without any warning to the person to whom I am speaking." 

"But is it like that for you?" I said. "Are your human times completely separate from your divine times?" 

John shook his head. "Far from it. My godly powers are severely limited – the god prefers that I use my human powers in all but the most important cases – but there are times when I find myself switching from human eyes to the god's eyes and back within a few seconds. I have to make an effort not to let others notice this, lest I frighten them." 

I said, "It must be hard for you, having to hide what you really are from others." 

John was on the point of opening the door to the corridor, but he stopped to lay the mask on a table nearby. "It's one of the duties I took on with my power: to be as unknowable in my own way as the Unknowable God. But I can always tell how much of my true nature another person can bear to see, and therefore how far I can open the flame of my power to them. You, for example, can bear the knowledge that I know what you did last night. I also know the guilt that you feel for the part that you played in your father's death." 

I stood motionless, looking into John's calm black eyes, and wondering who it was that was speaking. He placed his hands on my shoulders and said quietly, "I forgive you, daughter of Clelia, for I am able to turn men's evil deeds to good. I speak to you in this manner because I wish you to know how close I dwell to the surface of all that my servants say and do. Therefore you may be sure that I will be with you throughout your journey ahead. And when that journey is fully ended, I will come to you again, but I will not need words to speak to you then, for you will know my wishes without asking. Until then, trust me, and help me to heal the wounds of my servants." 

Then the Jackal let his hands drop, and he smiled at me before he opened the door and silently sent me on my way. For the rest of the day, as Perry and I prepared for our trip, I mused upon this encounter. It was not until nightfall that I found myself weeping into my head-cushion for the sake of the young man who had taken on the lonely burden of the god's powers. 

Even then, many hours passed before I realized that I had been mourning my father.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Beta readers:_ Katharine Bond, [hpfan12](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hpfan12/), and [Kathleen Livingston](http://www.freelance-proofreaders.com/freelancers/kathleen-livingston.htm).
> 
> [Publication history](http://duskpeterson.com/cvhep.htm#challenge).
> 
> This story was originally published at [duskpeterson.com](http://duskpeterson.com). The story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Copyright © 2019, 2020 Dusk Peterson. Permission is granted for fanworks inspired by this story. Please credit Dusk Peterson and duskpeterson.com for the original story.


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